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Font: Syriac
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The Aramaic language was the lingua franca in much of the Near East for more than one millennium until its displacement by Arabic in the 7th century AD. Besides the Square Aramaic script, several cursive scripts developed for writing Aramaic and its offshoots. Although its origin is not certain, Syriac became the most important of these scripts.
Following the Semitic model, the Syriac alphabet consists of 22 consonants which are equivalent to those of the Hebrew alphabet. While the Syriac alphabet is basically consonantal, three of the consonants are also used to convey long vowels in a manner similar to other Semitic scripts. Written from right to left, Syriac is a cursive, connected script whose letter forms vary slightly by context. Of the 22 letters, eight do not connect to their (left) successor. Some of the letterforms bear a strong resemblance to those of Hebrew or Arabic. A vast collection of early Christian literature, both original and translated from Greek, was written in Syriac whose oldest form is called 'Estrangelo'. After a split in the Syrian church in the 5th century AD, two new varieties of Syriac script developed. In the East, the style came to be called 'Nestorian', while in the West the style was 'Serto'.
Based on the Hebrew model of dots above and below consonants, a system for marking vowels in Syriac had developed. This system was adopted in the East where it was perfected in the 9th century. On the other hand, the Western branch of Syriac developed a different system based on diacritics modeled after miniature versions of Greek vowels. Syriac survives today as a minority language and as a liturgical language in some Christian communities.
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