Syriac

Syriac is a Unicode block containing characters for all forms of the Syriac script, including the Estrangela, Serto, Eastern Syriac, and the Christian Palestinian Aramaic variants. It is used in Literary Syriac, Neo-Aramaic, and Arabic among Syriac-speaking Christians. It was used historically to write Armenian, Persian, Ottoman Turkish, and Malayalam.

The Syriac alphabet is a writing system primarily used to write the Syriac language from the 1st century AD. It is one of the Semitic abjads directly descending from the Aramaic alphabet and shares similarities with the Phoenician, Hebrew  0590–05FF , Arabic, and the traditional Mongolian alphabets. Syriac is written from right to left. It is a cursive script where some, but not all, letters connect within a word. The alphabet consists of 22 letters, all of which are consonants. The vowel sounds are supplied by the reader's memory or by pointing (a system of diacritical marks to indicate the correct reading). In addition to the sounds of the language, the letters of the Syriac alphabet can be used to represent numbers in a system similar to Hebrew and Greek numerals. When Arabic began to be the dominant spoken language in the Fertile Crescent, texts were often written in Arabic with the Syriac script. Malayalam was also written with Syriac script and was called Suriyani Malayalam. These writings are usually called Karshuni or Garshuni. Garshuni is often used today by Neo-Aramaic speakers in written communication such as letters and fliers.