This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Syriac Letters gathers the twenty two signs of the abjad that carries the Peshitta and the wider Syriac Christian literature, continuing the Northwest Semitic sequence and its numeral values letter for letter from alaph, valued one, through taw.
Three distinct hands, Estrangela, Serto and Madnhaya, draw every letter differently while reading it the same, and six letters, beth, gamal, dalath, kaph, pe and taw, carry a hard and a soft pronunciation apiece, marked when a scribe chooses to by the qushshaya and rukkakha points above and below the letter, though ordinary running text commonly leaves both off and expects the reader to supply the value. Waw and yudh do double duty as vowel letters as well as consonants, waw for the long vowels u and o, yudh for i and e, and the eastern and western traditions point those vowels differently, the east with arrangements of dots, the west with small Greek vowel letters written above the line.
Letters join one another according to fixed rules, most on both sides and a smaller set, dalath, he, waw and zain among them, only to the right, so a word breaks into more than one connected run wherever one of those falls. Garshuni, the practice of writing Arabic in Syriac letters, adds marked variants of gamal and teth for sounds Syriac itself does not distinguish, a convention of that use rather than an addition to the twenty two letters the alphabet is still counted at.