the phoenician language was a semitic language, often called canaanite. the semitic group of languages includes arabic, maltese, hebrew and also aramaic, the language spoken by jesus. we do not know much about how the alphabetic idea arose, but the phoenicians, a trading people, came up with letters which were adapted by the early greeks to produce their alphabet. the one big difference is that the phoenician script had no pure vowels. arabic script has vowels which may be shown by diacritics (small marks above or below the line). the oldest qu'ran manuscripts had no diacritics. israeli children today use texts with vowel 'dots' added, to about the third grade.p89