Syriac alphabet in the context of "Aramaic"

⭐ In the context of Aramaic, Classical Syriac is primarily recognized as…

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⭐ Core Definition: Syriac alphabet

The Syriac alphabet (ܐܠܦ ܒܝܬ ܣܘܪܝܝܐ ʾālep̄ bêṯ Sūryāyā) is a writing system primarily used to write the Syriac language since the 1st century. It is one of the Semitic abjads descending from the Aramaic alphabet through the Palmyrene alphabet, and shares similarities with the Phoenician, Hebrew, Arabic and Sogdian, the precursor and a direct ancestor of 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. There is no letter case distinction between upper and lower case letters, though some letters change their form depending on their position within a word. Spaces separate individual words.

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👉 Syriac alphabet in the context of Aramaic

Aramaic (Jewish Babylonian Aramaic: ארמית, romanized: ˀərāmiṯ; Classical Syriac: ܐܪܡܐܝܬ, romanized: arāmāˀiṯ) is a Northwest Semitic language that originated in the ancient region of Syria and quickly spread to Mesopotamia, the southern Levant, Sinai, southeastern Anatolia, the Caucasus, and Eastern Arabia, where it has been continually written and spoken in different varieties for over 3,000 years.

Aramaic served as a language of public life and administration of ancient kingdoms and empires—particularly the Neo-Assyrian Empire, Neo-Babylonian Empire, and Achaemenid Empire—and as a language of divine worship and religious study within Judaism, Christianity, and Gnosticism. Several modern varieties of Aramaic are still spoken. The modern eastern branch is spoken by Assyrians, Mandeans, and Mizrahi Jews. Western Aramaic is still spoken by the Muslim and Christian Arameans (Syriacs) in the towns of Maaloula, Bakh'a and Jubb'adin in Syria. Classical varieties are used as liturgical and literary languages in several West Asian churches, as well as in Judaism, Samaritanism, and Mandaeism. The Aramaic language is considered endangered, with several varieties used mainly by the older generations. Researchers are working to record and analyze all of the remaining varieties of Neo-Aramaic languages in case they become extinct.

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Syriac alphabet in the context of Ugaritic alphabet

The Ugaritic alphabet is an abjad (consonantal alphabet) with syllabic elements written using the same tools as cuneiform (i.e. pressing a wedge-shaped stylus into a clay tablet), which emerged c. 1400 or 1300 BCE to write Ugaritic, an extinct Northwest Semitic language; it fell out of use amid the Late Bronze Age collapse c. 1190 BCE. It was discovered in Ugarit (modern Ras Shamra, Syria) in 1928. It has 30 letters. Other languages, particularly Hurrian, were occasionally written in the Ugaritic script in the area around Ugarit, but not elsewhere.

Clay tablets written in Ugaritic provide the earliest evidence of both the North Semitic and South Semitic orders of the alphabet, which gave rise to the alphabetic orders of the reduced Phoenician writing system and its descendants, including the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, Hebrew, Syriac, Greek and Latin, and of the Geʽez script, which was also influenced by the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic writing system, and adapted for Amharic. The Arabic and Ancient South Arabian scripts are the only other Semitic alphabets which have letters for all or almost all of the 29 commonly reconstructed Proto-Semitic consonant phonemes.

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Syriac alphabet in the context of T

T, or t, is the twentieth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is tee (pronounced /ˈt/ ), plural tees.

It is derived from the Semitic Taw 𐤕 of the Phoenician and Paleo-Hebrew script (Aramaic and Hebrew Taw ת/𐡕/, Syriac Taw ܬ, and Arabic ت Tāʼ) via the Greek letter τ (tau). In English, it is most commonly used to represent the voiceless alveolar plosive, a sound it also denotes in the International Phonetic Alphabet. It is the most commonly used consonant and the second-most commonly used letter in English-language texts.

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Syriac alphabet in the context of Samekh

Samekh or samech is the fifteenth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician sāmek 𐤎, Hebrew sāmeḵ ס‎, Aramaic samek 𐡎, and Syriac semkaṯ ܣ. Samekh is the only letter of the Semitic abjad that has no surviving descendant in the Arabic alphabet; however, it was present in the Nabataean alphabet, the Arabic alphabet's immediate predecessor, as the letter simkath 𐢖‎, which was related to the Ancient North Arabian 𐪏‎‎‎ and South Arabian 𐩯. The numerical value of samekh is 60. The page has Arabic س and Ge'ez ሰ in the cognate letters, because they are similar in pronunciation.

Samekh represents a voiceless alveolar fricative /s/. In the Hebrew language, the samekh ס‎ has the same pronunciation as the left-dotted shin שׂ‎.

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Syriac alphabet in the context of Aleph

Aleph (or alef or alif, transliterated ʾ) is the first letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician ʾālep 𐤀, Hebrew ʾālef א‎, Aramaic ʾālap 𐡀, Syriac ʾālap̄ ܐ, Arabic ʾalif ا‎, and North Arabian 𐪑. It also appears as South Arabian 𐩱 and Ge'ez ʾälef አ.

These letters are believed to have derived from an Egyptian hieroglyph depicting an ox's head to describe the initial sound of *ʾalp, the West Semitic word for ox (compare Biblical Hebrew אֶלֶףʾelef, "ox"). The Phoenician variant gave rise to the Greek alpha (Α), being re-interpreted to express not the glottal consonant but the accompanying vowel, and hence the Latin A and Cyrillic А and possibly the Armenian letter Ա.

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Syriac alphabet in the context of Lamed

Lamedh or lamed is the twelfth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Hebrew lāmeḏ ל‎, Aramaic lāmaḏ 𐡋, Syriac lāmaḏ ܠ, Arabic lām ل‎, and Phoenician lāmd 𐤋. Its sound value is [l]. It is also related to the Ancient North Arabian 𐪁‎‎‎, South Arabian 𐩡, and Ge'ez .

The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek Lambda (Λ), Latin L, and Cyrillic El (Л).

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Syriac alphabet in the context of Manichaean script

The Manichaean script is an abjad-based writing system rooted in the Semitic family of alphabets and associated with the spread of Manichaeism from southwest to central Asia and beyond, beginning in the third century CE. It is a variant of the Syriac script. It bears a sibling relationship to early forms of the Pahlavi scripts, both systems having developed from the Imperial Aramaic alphabet, in which the Achaemenid court rendered its particular, official dialect of Aramaic. Unlike Pahlavi, the Manichaean script reveals influences from the Sogdian alphabet, which in turn descends from the Syriac branch of Aramaic. The Manichaean script is so named because Manichaean texts attribute its design to Mani himself. Middle Persian is written with this alphabet.

The Iranologist Desmond Durkin-Meisterernst notes that the Manichaean script was mainly used to write numerous Middle Iranian languages (Manichaean Middle Persian, Parthian, Sogdian, Early New Persian, Bactrian) and Old Uyghur (a Turkic language). The Manichaean script is closely related to the Palmyrene alphabet of Palmyrene Aramaic and the Estrangelo script of Syriac.

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