Hebrew

The Hebrew "square script" seen today is not the oldest Hebrew hand — that was Paleo-Hebrew, a direct cousin of Phoenician. After the Babylonian Exile, Jewish scribes adopted the Aramaic square letters, and those became the sacred script in which scripture and everyday Hebrew have been written ever since.

Hebrew is an abjad: the 22 letters are consonants, and for everyday text the reader supplies the vowels. When precision matters — scripture, poetry, teaching — a system of dots and dashes called niqqud marks the vowels explicitly.

A script that never died, attached to a language that came back to life.

Hebrew is also the great case study in revival: the script and the written language never disappeared, but Hebrew stopped being anyone's mother tongue for roughly seventeen centuries and was deliberately brought back into daily speech — a near-unique event, treated fully in the Conservation Department. The descent from Phoenician through Aramaic is charted in the Hall of Lineages.

Five letters take a special final (sofit) form when they close a word — the pen, no longer needing to join what follows, is free to drop a tail below the line. The bare consonants are one thing; the vowels are another.