abjad

In Rabghuzi's Stories of the Prophets, a teacher asked Jesus, who was seven years old at the time, to repeat the alphabet and the abjad by rote.

Languages that use abjads include Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, and Urdu. Abjads differ from syllabaries (such as the Japanese hiragana) in that the vowel quality of each letter is left unspecified, and must be inferred from context and grammar.

The other names had no significance, except that the initial letter of each month denoted its place in the calendar according to the abjad system, which assigned a certain numerical power to every letter in the alphabet.