Biblical Hebrew and occasionally other literary works, distinct from the calligraphic styles used mainly for private purposes. The Mizrahi and Ashkenazi book-hand styles were later adapted to printed fonts after the invention of the printing press. The modern Hebrew alphabet, also known as the Assyrian or Square script, is a descendant of the Aramaic alphabet. The Phoenician script had dropped five characters by the 12th century BCE, reflecting the language's twenty-two consonantal phonemes. As a result, the 22 letters of the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet numbered less than the consonant phonemes of ancient Biblical Hebrew; in particular, the letters could each mark two different
Yemenite Hebrew the Qamats () and Tseri (). He argues that the pronunciation of Yemenite Hebrew was not only uninfluenced by Arabic, but it influenced the pronunciation of Arabic by those Jews, despite the Jewish presence in Yemen for over a millennium. Among the dialects of Hebrew preserved into modern times, Yemenite Hebrew is regarded as one of the forms that retains very many features of Hebrew as used in ancient times, particularly Tiberian Hebrew and Mishnaic Hebrew. This perception is motivated in part by the fact that Yemenite Hebrew preserves many consonant sounds represented by individual letters in the Hebrew alphabet