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
Biblical Hebrew phonemes. After a sound shift the letters , could only mark one phoneme, but (except in Samaritan Hebrew) still marked two. The old Babylonian vocalization system wrote a superscript above the to indicate it took the value , while the Masoretes added the shin dot to distinguish between the two varieties of the letter. The original Hebrew alphabet consisted only of consonants, but gradually the letters , , , , also became used to indicate vowels, known as "matres lectionis" when used in this function. It is thought that this was a product of phonetic development: for instance, *bayt ('house')