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
Samaritan alphabet copy of the text in Damascus, and this manuscript, now known as Codex B, was deposited in a Parisian library. The table below shows the development of the Samaritan script. On the left are the corresponding Hebrew letters for comparison. Column I is the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet. Column X shows the modern form of the letters. Consonants Vowels Punctuation Samaritan script was added to the Unicode Standard in October 2009 with the release of version 5.2. The Unicode block for Samaritan is U+0800–U+083F: Samaritan alphabet The Samaritan alphabet is used by the Samaritans for religious writings, including the Samaritan Pentateuch, writings