Aleph

Origin

The name aleph is derived from the West Semitic word for 'ox', as in the Biblical Hebrew word (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.

In Modern Standard Arabic, the word أليف /ʔaliːf/ 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 , the passive participle of the verb , meaning 'trained' (when referring to pets) or 'tamed' (when referring to wild animals).

{{anchor|Egyptian}} 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 and . 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 ا or 𐪑, spelled as ألف or 𐪑𐪁𐪐 and transliterated as ar, it is the first letter in Arabic and North Arabian. Together with Hebrew aleph, Greek alpha and Latin A, it is descended from Phoenician sem, from a reconstructed Proto-Canaanite sem "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.{{cite journal |article-number=e0232641 |doi-access=free

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:

Arabic variants

Alif mahmūza: {{big|أ}} and {{big|إ}}

Main article: Hamza

hamzat qaṭ' 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 ar ﺀ to fix the problem. Hamza is not considered a full letter in Arabic orthography: in most cases, it appears on a carrier, either a ar (ؤ), a dotless ar (ئ), or an alif. The choice of carrier depends on complicated orthographic rules. Alif إ أ is generally the carrier if the only adjacent vowel is ar. 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-ar, below it and indicates that the letter so modified is indeed a glottal stop, not a long vowel.

hamzat waṣl A second type of hamza, ar (همزة وصل) 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 ar in that it is elided after a preceding vowel. Alif is always the carrier.

Alif mamdūda: {{big|آ}}

alif maddah The alif mamdūda is a double alif, expressing both a glottal stop and a long vowel. Essentially, it is the same as a أا sequence, but is represented by placing a maddah over a regular alif: آ (final ـآ) ar , for example in آخر ar . "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: {{big|ى}}

alifmaqsura The ى ('limited/restricted alif', ar), commonly known in Egypt as ar (ألف لينة, '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, ar is indistinguishable from final Persian ye or Arabic ar as it is written in the Nile valley, sometimes elsewhere, and in the Quran.

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

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

In Arabic, alif maqsurah ى 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/: ().

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

Numeral

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

Aramaic

The Aramaic reflex of the letter is conventionally represented with the Hebrew א 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 alef

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 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.

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 (), 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 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 אהיה אשר אהיה), 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 in standard Yiddish.
• An aleph with the diacritic komets, , represents the vowel in standard Yiddish. Loanwords from Hebrew or Aramaic in Yiddish are spelled as they are in their language of origin.

Syriac ʾalaph/olaf

In the Syriac alphabet, the first letter is ܐ, , 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 ܐܸܢܵܐ 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 .

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.

Character encodings

|05D0|name1=Hebrew Letter Alef |0627|name2=Arabic Letter Alef |0710|name3=Syriac Letter Alaph |0800|name4=Samaritan Letter Alaf |10380|name5=Ugaritic Letter Alpa |10900|name6=Phoenician Letter Alf |10840|name7=Imperial Aramaic Letter Aleph |10AC0|name8=Manichaean Letter Aleph |2135|name9=Alef symbol |0FB21|name10=HEBREW LETTER WIDE ALEF

References

References

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13. (1999). "Mathematics into type. Copy editing and proofreading of mathematics for editorial assistants and authors". American Mathematical Society.
14. Weitz, Carmel Sapir. (2018-07-12). "Symbols of the Mapai Party".