Syriac alphabet Syriac alphabet The Syriac alphabet ( ) is a writing system primarily used to write the Syriac language since the 1st century AD. It is one of the Semitic abjads descending from the Aramaic alphabet through the Palmyrene alphabet, and it shares similarities with the Phoenician, Hebrew, Arabic and the traditional Mongolian scripts. Syriac is written from right to left in horizontal lines. It is a cursive script where most, but not all, letters connect within a word. Spaces separate individual words. All 22 letters are consonants, although there are optional diacritic marks to indicate vowels and other features. In
Arabic alphabet dots above; the letter ن (n) also has the same form in initial and medial forms, with one dot above, though it is somewhat different in isolated and final form. Both printed and written Arabic are cursive, with most of the letters within a word directly connected to the adjacent letters. There are two main collating sequences for the Arabic alphabet: abjad and hija. The original "" order (), used for lettering, derives from the order of the Phoenician alphabet, and is therefore similar to the order of other Phoenician-derived alphabets, such as the Hebrew alphabet. In this order, letters