Hebrew language plane"). Note that this does not happen to "mé" (the form of "min" or "mi-" used before the letter "he"), therefore "mé-ha-matos" is a valid form, which means "from the airplane". Like most other languages, the vocabulary of the Hebrew language is divided into verbs, nouns, adjectives, and so on, and its sentence structure can be analyzed by terms like object, subject, and so on. Modern Hebrew is written from right to left using the Hebrew alphabet, which is an "impure" abjad, or consonant-only script, of 22 letters. The ancient paleo-Hebrew alphabet is similar to those used for Canaanite and
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')