Hebrew alphabet written from right to left. It has 22 letters, five of which use different forms at the end of a word. In the traditional form, vowels are indicated by the weak consonants Aleph (), He (), Vav (), or Yodh () serving as vowel letters, or "matres lectionis": the letter is combined with a previous vowel and becomes silent, or by imitation of such cases in the spelling of other forms. Also, a system of vowel points to indicate vowels (diacritics), called niqqud, was developed. In modern forms of the alphabet, as in the case of Yiddish and to some
History of the Arabic alphabet History of the Arabic alphabet The history of the Arabic alphabet concerns the origins and the evolution of the Arabic script. It is thought that the Arabic alphabet is a derivative of the Nabataean variation of the Aramaic alphabet, which descended from the Phoenician alphabet, which, among others, gave rise to the Hebrew alphabet and the Greek alphabet (and therefore the Cyrillic and Roman alphabets). The Arabic alphabet evolved either from the Nabataean, or (less widely believed) directly from the Syriac. This table shows changes undergone by the shapes of the letters from the Aramaic original to the Nabataean and