History of the alphabet many letters the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet had nor what their alphabetic order was. Among its descendants, the Ugaritic alphabet had 27 consonants, the South Arabian alphabets had 29, and the Phoenician alphabet 22. These scripts were arranged in two orders, an "ABGDE" order in Phoenician and an "HMĦLQ" order in the south; Ugaritic preserved both orders. Both sequences proved remarkably stable among the descendants of these scripts. The letter names proved stable among the many descendants of Phoenician, including Samaritan, Aramaic, Syriac, Arabic, Hebrew, and Greek alphabet. However, they were largely abandoned in Tifinagh, Latin and Cyrillic. The letter sequence continued
Syriac alphabet addition to the sounds of the language, the letters of the Syriac alphabet can be used to represent numbers in a system similar to Hebrew and Greek numerals. Besides Syriac, the alphabet has been used to write other languages. When Arabic began to be the dominant spoken language in the Fertile Crescent after the Islamic conquest, texts were often written in Arabic with the Syriac script as knowledge of the Arabic alphabet was not yet widespread. Such writings are usually called "Karshuni" or "Garshuni" (). Garshuni is often used today in Neo-Aramaic writing, such as letters and fliers. Malayalam was