Hebrew letter
| Hebrew alphabet |
|
|---|---|
 |
|
| Type | |
| Languages | Hebrew and other Jewish languages |
|
Time period
|
3rd century BCE to present |
|
Parent systems
|
Egyptian hieroglyphs
|
|
Child systems
|
Yiddish alphabet |
|
Sister systems
|
|
| Direction | Right-to-left |
| ISO 15924 | Hebr, 125 |
|
Unicode alias
|
Hebrew |
|
|
The Hebrew alphabet (Hebrew: עִבְרִי, Alefbet Ivri), known variously by scholars as the Jewish script, square script and block script, is an abjad script used in the writing of the Hebrew language, also adapted as an alphabet script in the writing of other Jewish languages, most notably in Yiddish (lit. "Jewish" for Judeo-German), Djudío (lit. "Jewish" for Judeo-Spanish), and Judeo-Arabic. Historically, there have been two separate abjad scripts to write Hebrew. The original, old Hebrew script, is known as the paleo-Hebrew alphabet (which has been largely preserved, in an altered form, in the Samaritan alphabet), while the present "Jewish script" or "square script" to write Hebrew is a stylized form of the Aramaic alphabet and was known by Jewish sages as the Ashuri alphabet (lit. "Assyrian"), since its origins were alleged to be from Assyria. Various "styles" (in current terms, "fonts") of representation of the Jewish script letters described in this article also exist, as well as a cursive form which has also varied over time and place, and today is referred to as cursive Hebrew. In the remainder of this article, the term "Hebrew alphabet" refers to the Jewish square script unless otherwise indicated.
The Hebrew alphabet has 22 letters. It does not have case, but five letters have different forms when used at the end of a word. Hebrew is written from right to left. Originally, the alphabet was an abjad consisting only of consonants, but is now considered an "impure abjad". As with other abjads, such as the Arabic alphabet, scribes later devised means of indicating vowel sounds by separate vowel points, known in Hebrew as niqqud. In both biblical and rabbinic Hebrew, the letters א ה ו י are also used as matres lectionis (the use of certain consonants to indicate a vowel) to represent vowels. There is a trend in modern Modern Hebrew toward the use of matres lectionis to indicate vowels that have traditionally gone unwritten, a practice known as "full spelling".
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