[2] As in the Aramaic alphabet, long vowels were commonly written with matres lectionis, the consonants aleph, yodh and waw.

[2] However, unlike Aramaic and most abjads, these consonant signs would also sometimes serve to express the short vowels (which could also sometimes be left unexpressed as in the parent systems).

Since many letters in the cursive script are extremely similar in form, to the point of being indistinguishable, it is the most difficult to read of the three varieties.

[4] The Sogdian script is known from religious texts of Buddhism, Manichaeism, and Christianity, as well as from secular sources such as letters, coins, and legal documents.

[1] The Sogdian Buddhist texts, written in the sutra script, are younger, dating to approximately the sixth to eighth or ninth century.

They were found during the first two decades of the twentieth century in one of the caves of the Thousand Buddhas in the Chinese province of Gansu.

The bulk of these manuscripts reside in the British Library, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and the Russian Academy of Sciences.