was spread throughout the Mediterranean by Phoenician colonists, most notably to Carthage in today's Tunisia. The Phoenician alphabet is of fundamental importance in human history as the source and ancestor of the Greek alphabet, the later Latin alphabet, the Aramaic (Square Hebrew), Syriac, and Arabic writing systems, Germanic runes, and ultimately Cyrillic. From the 8th century BCE, the use of Imperial Aramaic by the Neo-Assyrian Empire (935-608 BC) and the succeeding Neo-Babylonian Empire (612-539 BC) and Achaemenid Empire (539-332 BC), a form of the Aramaic language, spread throughout the Northwest Semitic region of the Levant, northern regions of the Arabian peninsula and southern regions of Anatolia, and gradually drove most of the other Northwest Semitic languages to extinction. The ancient Judaeans adopted Aramaic for daily use, and parts of the Tanakh are written in it. Hebrew was preserved, however, as a Jewish liturgical language and language of scholarship, and resurrected in the 19th century, with modern adaptations, to become the Modern Hebrew language of the State of Israel. After the Muslim conquests of the 7th century, Arabic began to gradually replace Aramaic throughout the region. Aramaic survives today as the liturgical language of the Assyrian Church of the East, Syriac Orthodox Church, Chaldean Catholic Church, and other churches of Assyrian Christians. It is spoken in modern dialects with an estimated 1 million fluent speakers (some such as Assyrian Neo-Aramaic containing archaic Akkadian influence) by endangered indigenous and non-Muslim populations scattered throughout the Middle East, most commonly by Assyrians as well as Gnostic Mandeans and some Levantine Syriac Christians and Jews. There is also an Aramaic substratum in Levantine Arabic. Phonology Sound changes Phonologically, Ugaritic lost the sound ṣ́, replacing it with (ṣ) (the same shift occurred in Canaanite and Akkadian). That this same sound became in Aramaic (although in Ancient Aramaic, it was written with qoph), suggests that Ugaritic is not the parent language of the group. An example of this sound shift can be seen in the word for earth: Ugaritic (’arṣ), Punic (’arṣ), Tiberian Hebrew (’ereṣ), Biblical Hebrew (’arṣ) and Aramaic (’ar‘ā’). The vowel shift from to distinguishes Canaanite from Ugaritic. Also, in the Canaanite group, the series of Semitic interdental fricatives become sibilants: (ḏ), (ṯ) and (ṱ) became , (š) and (ṣ) respectively. The effect of this sound shift can be seen by comparing the following words: Vowels Proto-Northwest Semitic had three contrastive vowel qualities and a