Syriac alphabet Syriac alphabet The Syriac alphabet ( ) is a writing system primarily used to write the Syriac language since the 1st century AD. It is one of the Semitic abjads descending from the Aramaic alphabet through the Palmyrene alphabet, and it shares similarities with the Phoenician, Hebrew, Arabic and the traditional Mongolian scripts. Syriac is written from right to left in horizontal lines. It is a cursive script where most, but not all, letters connect within a word. Spaces separate individual words. All 22 letters are consonants, although there are optional diacritic marks to indicate vowels and other features. In
Phoenician alphabet where it evolved and was assimilated by many other cultures. The Paleo-Hebrew alphabet is a local variant of the Phoenician alphabetical script. Another derivative script is the Aramaic alphabet, which was the ancestor of the modern Arabic script. The Modern Hebrew script is a stylistic variant of the Aramaic script. The Greek alphabet (and by extension its descendants, such as Latin, Cyrillic, Runic, and Coptic) was also derived from Phoenician. As the letters were originally incised with a stylus, most of the shapes are angular and straight, although more cursive versions are increasingly attested in later times, culminating in the