Hebrew Alphabet
Hebrew is the official language in Israel and also one of the world’s oldest living languages. Hebrew is the member of the Canaanite group of Semitic languages. It was the language of early Jews but from 586 BC it started to replace Aramaic. By 70 AD use of Hebrew as an everyday language had largely ceased, but it continued to be used for literary and religious functions as well as Lingua Franca among Jews from different countries. During the mid nineteenth century, the efforts were made to receive Hebrew as the everyday language. Modern Hebrew is spoken by most of the 7 million people in Israel while Classical Hebrew has been used for prayer and study in Jewish communities around the world.
The Hebrew alphabet is known variously by scholars as Jewish script, square script, block script, or more historically Assyrian script. These alphabets are used in writing of the Hebrew language as well as other Jewish languages, most noticeably, Yiddish, Ladino and Judeo Arabic. There have been two scripts form in use. The original old Hebrew is known as the paleo Hebrew script, while the presented “square” form of the Hebrew alphabets is a stylized form of the Aramaic script. Various styles of representation of letters exist. There is also a cursive Hebrew script, which has also varied over time and place.
In the traditional form, the Hebrew alphabet is an abjad consisting only of consonants, written form right to left. It has 22 letters, five of which use different forms at the end of the word, lettes like hcg are used. The Hebrew alphabet has only one case; there is no distinct capital or lower case letters. Like other abjad, such as the Arabic alphabet, means were later devised to indicate vowels by separate vowel points, known in Hebrew as niqqud. In Rabbinic Hebrew the letters are also used as matres lectionis to represent vowels. In modern usage of the alphabet, as in case of Yiddish and to some extent modern Israeli Hebrew, vowels may be indicated. Today, the trend is towards full spelling with these letters acting as true vowels.
Before the adoption of present script, Hebrew was written by the ancient Israelites, both Jews and Samaritan, using the paleo Hebrew alphabet. During the 3rd century BC, Jews began to use a stylized form of Aramaic alphabet, with the Samaritans continued to use a form of paleo Hebrew script known as Samaritan script.
Neither the old Hebrew nor the Modern Hebrew script has case, but five letters has special five forms called sofit form, used only at the end of a word, somewhat as in the Arabic and Mandaic alphabets.
The letters of the Hebrew alphabet have played varied roles in Jewish religious literature over the centuries, primarily in mystic texts. Some sources in classical rabbinical literature seem to acknowledge the historical provenance of the currently used Hebrew alphabets and deal with them as a mundane subject; others attribute mystical significance to the letters, connecting them with the process of or the redemption.