= Pictorial Hebrew for "Jews of Yemen"

There was no evidence of Pictorial Hebrew (ie: the first so-called Proto-Canaanite or Proto Sinaic Alphabet scripts) amongst the Jews of Yemen (that I am aware of). Although there is early archaeological evidence that it existed. The practice of using a pictograph to stand for the first sound in the word it stood for is called acrophony and was the first step in the development of an ALPHABET or the "One Sign-One sound" system of writing.  According to many, the Proto-Canaanite system was the first consonantal Alphabet --rather than a syllabic system. Others argue that it still was a syllabic system at that point. Either way, the term "Alphabet" implies a limited number of letters (twenty to thirty) listed in a fixed order. The individual value of each letter is not important to the definition. Proto-Canaanite was clearly an Alphabet script. As Jews (and people of faith), this leaves us many questions about the look of our current Hebrew script. But there are answers.

There are many valid Jewish sources that readily admit the dynamic history of our changing Hebrew script. Reasons are recorded (in Jewish history) for these changes at specific times. This line of thinking agrees with tradition and current scientific evidence. The script (used by the entire world) went through a metamorphosis (ie: Egyptian and other languages) right around the time that Hebrew scriptures mention the Tower of Bavel.  The origin of the Phoenician letters [and even more so the Old Negev letters] in the Proto-Canaanite and Proto-Sinaiic scripts, and the borrowing of most, if not all, letter forms in the latter script from Egyptian hieroglyphics on the basis of acrophony are now seen as indubitable facts (cf. Snyczer 1974, 9). But this need not bother a person of faith. For a discussion on the three legally valid (and thus wide open) views on the origins of our Alphabet (from Jewish sources)... click here.  At this time, I believe only the Zoharistic schools are stuck on the idea that today's Hebrew "block script" was the same as Adam's (haRishon's) Hebrew script...or that the universe was created with letters that look like the ones we have today. I am looking into this further.

Since the third millenium BCE, Hebrew has undergone transformations in appearance.  No matter how you slice it, our current square Hebrew Alphabet has changed (for whatever reasons and orders) from the Paleo Hebrew version that originally came from pictorial Hebrew  (Proto Canaanite/Sinaic) pictured below --according to many secular and religious (Jewish) scholars. So I only thought it appropriate to write the words "Jews of Yemen" (shown above) in this ancient script.

The chart below shows the symbols but should not be relied upon (totally) for pronunciation.

Rav Sa'adya Gaon (flourished roughly 1100 years ago, universally accepted as one of the greatest sages, in all areas of Tora, of all time) in his commentary to Sefer Yesira (p. 74 onwards) states the following facts: 

1) There are 29 consonantal sounds in our language (22+7). No two letters are identical, with the exception of 'sin' and 'samekh'. 

2) The letters of our aleph beth are identical to those of (classical) Arabic, unless otherwise stated.

3) We possess four sounds that Arabic does not: Veth, Gimmel, Pe and the strong (or second) pronuncition of Resh. 

4) The Arabs have three that we lack: Jin (as the 'j' in jaywalk), a second, deeper version of our dotted Daleth, and a second, deeper version of our undotted Daleth. The very same information is imparted to us by R. Du

ALTHOUGH IN OTHER PLACES-- The Gimal without the dot was pronounced differently. The Temanim use a J. The Bavlim use a G. The point is that both recognize two sounds depending on whether there is a dagesh.