ʾalif

Aleph (or alef or alif, transliterated ʾ) is the first letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician , Hebrew , Aramaic , Syriac , Arabic ʾ and North Arabian 𐪑. It also appears as South Arabian 𐩱 and Ge'ez .

These letters are believed to have derived from an Egyptian hieroglyph depicting an ox's head to describe the initial sound of ''*ʾalp'', the West Semitic ''ʾelef'', "ox"). The Phoenician variant gave rise to the Greek alpha (), being re-interpreted to express not the glottal consonant but the accompanying vowel, and hence the Latin A and Cyrillic А.

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 (). 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 , 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 Eleph (אֶלֶף) '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. F1

In Modern Standard Arabic, the word literally means 'tamed' or 'familiar', derived from the root , from which the verb ألِف means 'to be acquainted with; to be on intimate terms with'. In modern Hebrew, the same root (alef-lamed-peh) gives ''me’ulaf'', the passive participle of the verb ''le’alef'', meaning '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.

Ancient Egyptian

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 () 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 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER EGYPTOLOGICAL ALEF and U+A723 ꜣ LATIN SMALL LETTER EGYPTOLOGICAL ALEF. A fallback representation is the numeral ''3'', or the Middle English character ''ȝ'' Yogh; neither are to be preferred to the genuine Egyptological characters.

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.

Hebrew

Hebrew spelling:

In Modern Israeli Hebrew, the letter either represents a glottal stop () 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: "he", "main", "head", "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. 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

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