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Aleph (or alef or alif, transliterated ʾ) is the first letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician ʾālep 𐤀, Hebrew alphabet ʾālef , Aramaic alphabet ʾālap 𐡀, Syriac alphabet ʾālap̄ ܐ, Arabic alphabet ʾalif , and North Arabian 𐪑. It also appears as South Arabian 𐩱 and Ge'ez ʾälef አ.
These letters are believed to have derived from an Egyptian hieroglyph depicting an ox's head to Acrophony of *ʾalp, the West Semitic word for ox (compare Biblical Hebrew ʾelef, "ox"). The Phoenician variant 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 and possibly the Armenian letter Ա.
phonetics, 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 (), 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 transliteration as , based on the Greek spiritus lenis ʼ; for example, in the transliteration of the letter name itself, .
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).
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.
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:
The choice of carrier depends on complicated orthographic rules. Alif إ أ 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, (همزة وصل) whose diacritic is normally omitted outside of sacred texts, occurs only as the initial letter of the Al- and in some related cases. It differs from in that it is elided after a preceding vowel. Alif is always the carrier.
"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).
The letter is transliterated as in Kazakh language, representing the vowel /ə/. is transliterated as in ALA-LC, in DIN 31635, in ISO 233-2, and 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:
| + !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 |
In Modern Hebrew, the letter either represents a glottal stop () or indicates a hiatus (the separation of two adjacent vowels into distinct , 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 calendar, it means 1000 (e.g. in Arabic numerals would be the Hebrew Calendar 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 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 language and Arabic language origin, in foreign names, and some other borrowed words.
| א | א | א |
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 and formulas.
Aleph represents the oneness of God. The letter can be seen as being composed of an upper yodh, 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.
Judaism relates aleph to the element of air, and the Scintillating Intelligence (#11) of the path between Kether and Chokmah in the Tree of the Sephiroth .
| Madnḫaya alap |
| Serṭo olaph |
| Esṭrangela alap |
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 elision. For example, when the Syriac first-person singular pronoun ܐܸܢܵܐ is in clitic 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.
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 .
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