One letter. Two alphabets. Both readers.

In the late 1800s the French ophthalmologist Louis Émile Javal noticed that readers of Latin script recognise words from the top halves of the letters alone: the bottoms are mostly padding. Turkenich ran the same test on her two scripts and found they disagree about which half matters. Hebrew keeps its identity downstairs; Arabic keeps its dots, teeth and tall strokes upstairs. Opposite halves, one letter. Try covering each one yourself:

Each Arabic letter over the Hebrew cousin it grew up with (the same pairings as the alphabet module). Where Hebrew merged two Arabic sounds into one letter, the cousin shows up twice.

Type any pair, then move the fold. The fold is a seam sliding through the word: toward “more Hebrew” the Hebrew letters stand taller and the Arabic sits lower; toward “more Arabic” the Arabic stands taller and the Hebrew gets compact. Every letter stays whole on both sides, so find the balance that reads best to you. When you like it, switch the whole site over and read the vocabulary, the roots and the alphabet this way.

Cognates are Aravrit's natural habitat: the same Semitic root usually means the same number of letters, so each cell is a whole hybrid. These are every true or shifted cognate in the word bank whose letters all pair up. Tap the meaning to read the family story.

Aravrit (עברית + عربية: ivrit folded into aravit) is a typeface by the Haifa type designer Liron Lavi Turkenich. Her city signs everything three times over, and she caught herself reading the Hebrew and skipping the Arabic. So she made a script where you can't skip either: every letter is Arabic on the upper half and Hebrew on the lower half.

She drew a hybrid for every possible pair, 638 letters in all, and released the face in 2012. It has since been set on street signs, in a TEDx talk, at the London Design Museum, the Jerusalem Light Festival, SXSW and Expo 2020 Dubai, and on prints, ceramics and jewellery from her own studio.