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
Arabic alphabet dots above; the letter ن (n) also has the same form in initial and medial forms, with one dot above, though it is somewhat different in isolated and final form. Both printed and written Arabic are cursive, with most of the letters within a word directly connected to the adjacent letters. There are two main collating sequences for the Arabic alphabet: abjad and hija. The original "" order (), used for lettering, derives from the order of the Phoenician alphabet, and is therefore similar to the order of other Phoenician-derived alphabets, such as the Hebrew alphabet. In this order, letters