Aleph

Aleph Bet →
Phoenician	𐤀‎
Hebrew	א‎
Samaritan	Template:Script/Samaritan
Aramaic	Template:Script/Aramaic
Syriac	ܐTemplate:Script/doc/id-unk
Nabataean	𐢁𐢀Template:Script/doc/id-unk
Arabic	ا‎
South Arabian	𐩱Template:Script/doc/id-unk
Geʽez	አTemplate:Script/doc/id-unk
North Arabian	𐪑Template:Script/doc/id-unk
Ugaritic	𐎀
Phonemic representation
Position in alphabet	1
Numerical value	1
Alphabetic derivatives of the Phoenician
Greek	Α
Latin	A, Ɑ
Cyrillic	А, Ѧ, Ѫ, Ӏ

Aleph (also spelled alef or alif, transliterated ʾ) is the first letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician ʾālep 𐤀‎, Hebrew ʾālef א‎, Aramaic ʾālap Template:Script/Aramaic, Syriac ʾālap̄ ܐTemplate:Script/doc/id-unk, Arabic ʾalif ا‎, and North Arabian Template:Script/Old North Arabian. It also appears as South Arabian Template:Script/Old South Arabian and Ge'ez ʾälef አ.

These letters are believed to have derived from an Egyptian hieroglyph depicting the head of an ox to describe the initial sound of , the West Semitic word for "ox" (compare Biblical Hebrew Template:Translit, 'ox'). The Phoenician variant gave rise to the Greek alpha (), being reinterpreted to express not the glottal consonant but the accompanying vowel, and hence the Latin A and Cyrillic А and possibly the Armenian letter Ա.

Phonetically, aleph originally represented the onset of a vowel at the glottis. In Semitic languages, this functions as a prosthetic weak consonant, allowing roots with only two true consonants to be conjugated in the manner of a standard three consonant Semitic root. In most Hebrew dialects as well as Syriac, the aleph is an absence of a true consonant, a glottal stop ([ʔ]), the sound found in the catch in uh-oh. In Arabic, the alif represents the glottal stop pronunciation when it is the initial letter of a word. In texts with diacritical marks, the pronunciation of an aleph as a consonant is rarely indicated by a special marking, hamza in Arabic and mappiq in Tiberian Hebrew. In later Semitic languages, aleph could sometimes function as a mater lectionis indicating the presence of a vowel elsewhere (usually long). When this practice began is the subject of some controversy, though it had become well established by the late stage of Old Aramaic (ca. 200 BCE). Aleph is often transliterated as U+02BE ʾ , based on the Greek spiritus lenis ; for example, in the transliteration of the letter name itself, .

Origin

The name aleph is derived from the West Semitic word for 'ox', as in the Biblical Hebrew word Template:Tlit () 'ox', and the shape of the letter derives from a Proto-Sinaitic glyph that may have been based on an Egyptian hieroglyph, which depicts an ox's head.

Hieroglyph	Proto-Sinaitic	Phoenician	Paleo-Hebrew
𓃾

In Modern Standard Arabic, the word /ʔaliːf/ literally means 'tamed' or 'familiar', derived from the root , from which the verb means 'to be acquainted with; to be on intimate terms with'. In modern Hebrew, the same root (alef-lamed-peh) gives Template:Tlit, the passive participle of the verb Template:Tlit, meaning 'trained' (when referring to pets) or 'tamed' (when referring to wild animals).

Ancient Egyptian

<hiero> A </hiero>
"Aleph" in hieroglyphs
Template:Hiero/era | Era: Template:Hiero/era

The Egyptian "vulture" hieroglyph (Gardiner G1), by convention pronounced ) is also referred to as aleph, on grounds that it has traditionally been taken to represent a glottal stop (), although some recent suggestions tend towards an alveolar approximant ([ɹ]) sound instead. Despite the name it does not correspond to an aleph in cognate Semitic words, where the single "reed" hieroglyph is found 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 and U+A723 ꜣ . A fallback representation is the numeral 3, or the Middle English character ȝ Yogh; neither are to be preferred to the genuine Egyptological characters.

Arabic ʾalif

Written as or 𐪑, spelled as or 𐪑𐪁𐪐 and transliterated as , it is the first letter in Arabic and North Arabian. Together with Hebrew aleph, Greek alpha and Latin A, it is descended from Phoenician , from a reconstructed Proto-Canaanite "ox".

In classical Arabic calligraphy, alif is also used as the main reference for the proportions of the other letters. Its height is traditionally measured in nuqṭah (نقطة "dots"), which represent the width of the pen nib. Different calligraphy manuals give different values for the height of alif, usually between five and ten dots, depending on the script. A 2020 study by Yaghan analyzed these traditional rules using geometric methods and showed that the different historical measurements can be explained by changes in pen angle and how the dots are arranged, while still keeping simple whole-number height-to-width ratios. The study also discusses how other letters were historically derived from alif and from a circle based on its height.

Alif has the highest frequency out of all 28 letters in the Arabic abjad.

Alif is written in one of the following ways depending on its position in the word:

Position in word:	Isolated	Final	Medial	Initial
Glyph form: (Help)	ا‎	ـا‎	ـا‎	ا‎

North Arabian
𐪑

Arabic variants

Alif mahmūza: أ and إ

The Arabic letter alif was originally used to render either a long or a glottal stop . That led to orthographical confusion and to the introduction of the additional marking to fix the problem. Hamza is not considered a full letter in Arabic orthography: in most cases, it appears on a carrier, either a (), a dotless (), or an alif.

Position in word:	Isolated	Final	Medial	Initial
Glyph form: (Help)	أ‎	ـأ‎	ـأ‎	أ‎

The choice of carrier depends on complicated orthographic rules. Alif is generally the carrier if the only adjacent vowel is . It is the only possible carrier if 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-, below it and indicates that the letter so modified is indeed a glottal stop, not a long vowel.

A second type of hamza, (), whose diacritic is normally omitted outside of sacred texts, occurs only as the initial letter of the definite article and in some related cases. It differs from in that it is elided after a preceding vowel. Alif is always the carrier.

Position in word:	Isolated	Final	Medial	Initial
Glyph form: (Help)	ٱ‎	ـٱ‎	ـٱ‎	ٱ‎

Alif mamdūda: آ

The is a double alif, expressing a glottal stop followed by a long . Essentially, it is the same as a sequence, but is represented by placing a maddah over a regular alif: (final ) , for example in 'last'.

Position in word:	Isolated	Final	Medial	Initial
Glyph form: (Help)	آ‎	ـآ‎	ـآ‎	آ‎

"It has become standard for a hamza followed by a long ā to be written as two alifs, one vertical and one horizontal", the "horizontal" alif being the maddah sign.

Alif maqṣūrah: ى

The ى ('limited/restricted alif', ), commonly known in Egypt as (, 'flexible alif'), may appear only at the end of a word. Although it looks different from a regular alif, it represents the same sound , often realized as a short vowel. When it is written, is indistinguishable from final Persian ye or Arabic as it is written in the Nile valley, sometimes elsewhere, and in the Quran.

The letter is transliterated as in Kazakh, representing the vowel /ə/. In Jawi it is known as ye and represents a schwa /ə/.

is transliterated as in ALA-LC, in DIN 31635, in ISO 233-2, and in ISO 233.

In Arabic, alif maqsurah is not used initially or medially, and it is not joinable initially or medially in any font. However, the letter is used initially and medially in the Uyghur Arabic alphabet and the Arabic-based Kyrgyz alphabet, representing the vowel /ɯ/: (ىـ ـىـ‎).

Position in word:	Isolated	Final	Medial	Initial
Glyph form: (Help)	ى‎	ـى‎	ـىـ‎	ىـ‎

As a vowel, the letter alif maqsurah can be a carrier with a hamza. The alif maqṣūrah with hamza is thus written as:

Position in word:	Isolated	Final	Medial	Initial
Glyph form: (Help)	ئ‎	ـئ‎	ـئـ‎	ئـ‎

Numeral

As a numeral, alif stands for the number one. It may be modified as follows to represent other numbers.

Modification to alif	Number represented
One dot below	1,000
One line below	10,000
One line above	1,000,000
Two dots below	10,000,000

Aramaic

The Aramaic reflex of the letter is conventionally represented with the Hebrew in typography for convenience, but the actual graphic form varied significantly over the long history and wide geographic extent of the language. Maraqten identifies three different aleph traditions in East Arabian coins: a lapidary Aramaic form that realizes it as a combination of a V-shape and a straight stroke attached to the apex, much like a Latin K; a cursive Aramaic form he calls the "elaborated X-form", essentially the same tradition as the Hebrew reflex; and an extremely cursive form of two crossed oblique lines, much like a simple Latin X.

Cursive Aramaic	Lapidary Aramaic

Hebrew alef

Hebrew spelling: אָלֶף ‎

In Modern Israeli Hebrew, the letter either represents a glottal stop ([ʔ]) or indicates a hiatus (the separation of two adjacent vowels into distinct syllables, with no intervening consonant). It is sometimes silent (word-finally always, word-medially sometimes: הוּא‎ "he", רָאשִׁי‎ "main", רֹאשׁ‎ "head", רִאשׁוֹן‎ "first"). The pronunciation varies in different Jewish ethnic divisions.

In gematria, aleph represents the number 1, and when used at the beginning of Hebrew years, it means 1000 (e.g. א׳תשנ״ד‎ in numbers would be the Hebrew date 1754, not to be confused with 1754 CE).

Aleph, along with ayin, resh, he and heth, cannot receive a dagesh. (However, there are few very rare examples of the Masoretes adding a dagesh or mappiq to an aleph or resh. The verses of the Hebrew Bible for which an aleph with a mappiq or dagesh appears are Genesis 43:26, Leviticus 23:17, Job 33:21 and Ezra 8:18.)

In Modern Hebrew, the frequency of the usage of alef, out of all the letters, is 4.94%.

Aleph is sometimes used as a mater lectionis to denote a vowel, usually . That use is more common in words of Aramaic and Arabic origin, in foreign names, and some other borrowed words.

Orthographic variants
Various print fonts			Cursive Hebrew	Rashi script
Serif	Sans-serif	Monospaced
א	א	א

Rabbinic Judaism

Aleph is the subject of a midrash that praises its humility in not demanding to start the Bible. (In Hebrew, the Bible begins with the second letter of the alphabet, bet.) In the story, aleph is rewarded by being allowed to start the Ten Commandments. (In Hebrew, the first word is anoki (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 (אֱמֶת‎), which means truth. In Judaism, it was the letter aleph that was carved into the head of the golem that ultimately gave it life.

Aleph also begins the three words that make up God's name in Exodus, I Am who I Am (in Hebrew, Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh ), and aleph is an important part of mystical amulets and formulas.

Aleph represents the oneness of God. The letter can be seen as being composed of an upper yud, a lower yud, and a vav leaning on a diagonal. The upper yud represents the hidden and ineffable aspects of God while the lower yud represents God's revelation and presence in the world. The vav ("hook") connects the two realms.

Yiddish

In Yiddish, aleph is used for several orthographic purposes in native words, usually with different diacritical marks borrowed from Hebrew niqqud:

• With no diacritics, aleph is silent; it is written at the beginning of words before vowels spelled with the letter vov or yud. For instance, oykh 'also' is spelled . The digraph represents the initial diphthong [], but that digraph is not permitted at the beginning of a word in Yiddish orthography, so it is preceded by a silent aleph. Some publications use a silent aleph adjacent to such vowels in the middle of a word as well when necessary to avoid ambiguity.
• An aleph with the diacritic pasekh, , represents the vowel [a] in standard Yiddish.
• An aleph with the diacritic komets, , represents the vowel [ɔ] in standard Yiddish.

Loanwords from Hebrew or Aramaic in Yiddish are spelled as they are in their language of origin.

Syriac ʾalaph/olaf

Alaph
Madnḫaya alap
Serṭo olaph
Esṭrangela alap

In the Syriac alphabet, the first letter is , Template:Langx, alap (in eastern dialects) or olaph (in western dialects). It is used in word-initial position to mark a word beginning with a vowel, but some words beginning with i or u do not need its help, and sometimes, an initial alap/olaph 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/ana. 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 it a palatal approximant), a long i/e (less commonly o/a) or is silent.

South Arabian/Ge'ez

In the Ancient South Arabian alphabet, 𐩱 appears as the seventeenth letter of the South Arabian abjad. The letter is used to render a glottal stop .

In the Ge'ez alphabet, ʾälef አ appears as the thirteenth letter of its abjad. This letter is also used to render a glottal stop .

South Arabian	Ge'ez
𐩱	አ

Other uses

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. In older mathematics books, the letter aleph is often printed upside down by accident, partly because a Monotype matrix for aleph was mistakenly constructed the wrong way up.

Politics

The Mapai political party in Israel used an aleph as its election symbol, and featured it prominently in its campaign posters.

Religion

Guru Nanak, regarded as the founder of Sikhism, used the aleph to represent the oneness of God. Aleph is also the current name of a religious cult in Japan.

Phonetics

In IPA the aleph glotal plosive is depicted by Ɂ (unicode point LATIN CAPITAL LETTER GLOTAL STOP, U+0241) In earlier days of phonology a small arch based on Greek Smooth breathing or a doubled one (now depicted by Ꜣ, unicode point LATIN CAPITAL LETTER EGYPTOLOGICAL ALEF) was used for this purpose.

See also

• Modifier letter right half ring Template:Char
• Al-
• Aleph number
• Arabic yāʼ
• Hamzah

References

• "The Letter Aleph (א)". Hebrew Today. Retrieved 2019-05-05.