The Abjad order of the Arabic alphabet has two slightly different variants. The Abjad order is not a simple historical continuation of the earlier north Semitic alphabetic order, since it has a position corresponding to the Aramaic letter "samekh / semkat" , yet no letter of the Arabic alphabet historically derives from that letter. Loss of ' was compensated for by the split of ' into two independent Arabic letters, (') and ('), which moved up to take the place of "".