Hebrew alphabet and was known by Jewish sages as the Ashuri alphabet (lit. "Assyrian"), since its origins were alleged to be from Assyria. Various "styles" (in current terms, "fonts") of representation of the Jewish script letters described in this article also exist, including a variety of cursive Hebrew styles. In the remainder of this article, the term "Hebrew alphabet" refers to the square script unless otherwise indicated. The Hebrew alphabet has 22 letters. It does not have case, but five letters have different forms when used at the end of a word. Hebrew is written from right to left. Originally, the alphabet
History of the Arabic alphabet the same. After all this, there were only 17 letters that were different in shape. One letter-shape represented 5 phonemes ("b t th n" and sometimes "y"), one represented 3 phonemes ("j ħ kh"), and 5 each represented 2 phonemes. Compare the Hebrew alphabet, as in the table at . A similar ambiguity occurs in the German Fraktur font, in which the Roman alphabet uppercase letters I and J look the same but are officially different letters. The Arabic alphabet is first attested in its classical form in the 7th century. See PERF 558 for the first surviving Islamic Arabic