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
Unicode and HTML for the Hebrew alphabet Unicode and HTML for the Hebrew alphabet The Unicode and HTML for the Hebrew alphabet are found in the following tables. The Unicode Hebrew block extends from U+0590 to U+05FF and from U+FB1D to U+FB4F. It includes letters, ligatures, combining diacritical marks ("niqqud" and cantillation marks) and punctuation. The Numeric Character References is included for HTML. These can be used in many markup languages, and they are often used on web pages to create the Hebrew glyphs presentable by the majority of web browsers. Note I: The ligatures are intended for Yiddish. They are not used in Hebrew.<br> Note II: