is the reconstructed name of the first letter of the
Proto-Canaanite alphabet, continued in descended
Semitic alphabets as
Phoenician 15px|,
Syriac ,
Hebrew Aleph , and
Arabic .
Aleph originally represented the
glottal stop (
IPA ), usually
transliterated as
(U+02BE) "
modifier letter right half ring", a character of the Unicode
Spacing Modifier Letters range, based on the Greek
spiritus lenis . For example in the transliteration of the letter name itself,
.
The Phoenician letter gave rise to the
Greek Alpha (Α), being re-interpreted to express not the glottal consonant but the accompanying
vowel, and hence the
Latin A and
Cyrillic А.
Origin
Aleph is thought to be derived from the West Semitic word for "
ox", and the shape of the letter derives from a
Proto-Sinaitic glyph based on a
hieroglyph depicting an ox's head,
F1
.
In modern Hebrew, "me'ulaf", derived from the Hebrew root (alef-lamed-pe) is the passive participle of the verb "le'alef", and means trained (when referring to pets) or tamed (when referring to wild animals); the
IDF rank of
Aluf, taken from an
Edomite title of nobility, is also cognate. In modern Arabic, "aleef" literally means "tame animal".
Hebrew Aleph
In
Modern Israeli Hebrew, the letter represents either a
glottal stop, or has no pronunciation besides that of the
vowel attached to it. The pronunciation varies among
Jewish ethnic groups.
In
gematria, aleph represents the number 1, and when used at the beginning of
Hebrew years, it means 1000 (i.e. א'תשנ"ד in
numbers would be the
date 1754).
Aleph, along with
Ayin,
Resh,
He, and
Heth, cannot receive a
dagesh. (However, there are few very rare examples where the
Masoretes added a dagesh to an Aleph or Resh.)
Aleph is sometimes used as a
mater lectionis to denote a vowel, usually . Such use is more common in words of
Aramaic and
Arabic origin, in foreign names and some other borrowed words.
In Rabbinic Judaic folktale
'Aleph is the subject of a
midrash which praises its humility in not demanding to start the Bible. (In
Hebrew the Bible begins with the second letter of the
alphabet,
Bet.) In this folktale, 'Aleph is rewarded by being allowed to start the
Ten Commandments. (In
Hebrew, the first word is אָנֹכִי, which starts with an aleph.)
In the
Sefer Yetzirah, The
letter 'Aleph is
King over Breath, Formed Air in the universe, Temperate in the Year, and the
Chest in the soul.
'Aleph is also the first letter of the
Hebrew word
emet, which means
truth. In
Jewish mythology it was the letter aleph that was carved into the head of the
golem which ultimately gave it life.
Aleph also begins the three words that make up God's mystical name in
Exodus,
I Am That I Am (in
Hebrew, 'Ehyeh 'Asher 'Ehyeh
אהיה אׁשר אהיה), and 'aleph is an important part of mystical
amulets and formulas.
Jewish mysticism relates Aleph to the element of air, the fool (number 0) of the tarot deck, and the Scintillating Intelligence (#11) of the path between Kether and Chokmah in the Tree of the Sephiroth.
Hebrew sayings with Aleph
From Aleph to Tav describes something from beginning to end; the Hebrew equivalent of the English
From A to Z.
One who doesn't know how to make an Aleph is someone who is illiterate.
No...with a big Aleph! (
lo b'aleph rabati - לא באלף רבתי) means
Absolutely not!.
Mathematics
In
set theory, the Hebrew aleph glyph is used as the symbol to denote the
aleph numbers, which represent the
cardinality of infinite sets. This notation was introduced by mathematician
Georg Cantor.
Syriac Olaf/Alap
In the
Syriac alphabet, the first letter is — — Olaf (in western pronunciation) or Alap (in eastern pronunciation). It is used in word-initial position to mark a word beginning with a vowel — although some words beginning with
i or
u do not need its help, and sometimes an initial Olaf/Alap is
elided. For example, when the Syriac
first-person singular pronoun is in
enclitic positions, it is pronounced
no/na (again west/east) rather than the full form
eno/ena. The letter occurs very regularly at the end of words, where it represents the long final vowels
o/a or
e. In the middle of the word, the letter represents either a
glottal stop between vowels (but West Syriac pronunciation often makes this a
palatal approximant), a long
i/e (less commonly
o/a) or is silent.´
Numeral
As a numeral it Olaf/Alap stands for the number one. With a dot below, it is the number 1,000, with a line above it, Olaf/Alap will represent 1,000,000. with a line below it is 10,000 and with two dots below it is 10,000,000.
Arabic Alif
Alif (
ألف) (, pronounced ) is the first letter of the
Arabic alphabet.
Together with Hebrew
Aleph, Greek
Alpha and Latin
A, it is descended from
Phoenician , from
Proto-Canaanite "ox".
Historically, the Arabic letter was used to render either a long , or a
glottal stop . This led to
orthographical confusion, and to introduction of the additional letter
hamzatu l-qat` . Hamza is not considered a full
harf in Arabic orthography: in most cases it appears on a carrier, either a
waw, a dotless
yā, or an alif. The choice of carrier depends on complicated orthographic rules. Alif is generally the carrier where the only adjacent vowel is fatha
. It is the only possible carrier where hamza is the first phoneme of a word. Where alif acts as a carrier for hamza, hamza is added above the alif, or, for initial alif kasra, below it, indicating that the letter so modified does indeed signify a glottal stop, and not a long vowel.
A second type of hamza, (همزة الوصل), occurs only as the initial phoneme of the definite article and in some related cases. It differs from hamzatu l-qat`
in that it is elided after a preceding vowel. Again, alif is always the carrier.
The is, as it were, a double alif, expressing both a glottal stop and a long vowel: (final ) , for example in
The (الألف المقصورة'), or "broken alif," looks like a dotless ,
(final
). It may only appear at the end of a word. Although it looks different from a regular Alif, it represents the same sound (long ).
Alif maqsura is transliterated as in
DIN 31635 and in
ISO 233.
can be confused with a because many writers (especially in Egypt) use a dotless "yaa" at the end of a word, when this letter should actually be written with two dots underneath. This makes it more difficult for Arabic learners to distinguish between these two letters, although native speakers can usually tell which letter is intended. The dotless "yaa" is not called
alif maqsura in these cases but it only looks like one.
Alif is written in one of the following ways depending on its position in the word:
In Egyptology
The Egyptian "vulture"
hieroglyph (
Gardiner G1), by convention pronounced as [a]) is also referred to as
alef, on grounds that it has traditionally been taken to represent a glottal stop, although some recent suggestions tend towards an sound instead.
The phoneme is commonly transliterated by a symbol composed of two half-rings, in
Unicode (as of version 5.1, in the
Latin Extended D range) encoded at U+A722 Ꜣ (uppercase) and U+A723 ꜣ (lowercase). It is often represented by the numeral
3 instead, and in some schemes also
as ȝ.
See also
