Aleph
Aleph А |
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Aleph (or alef or alif, transliterated
These letters are believed to have derived from an
Origin
The name aleph is derived from the West Semitic word for "
Hieroglyph | Proto-Sinaitic | Phoenician | Paleo-Hebrew | ||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
In Modern Standard Arabic, the word أليف /ʔaliːf/ literally means 'tamed' or 'familiar', derived from the root ʔ-L-F, from which the verb ألِف /ʔalifa/ means 'to be acquainted with; to be on intimate terms with'.[6] In modern Hebrew, the same root ʔ-L-P (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).
Ancient Egyptian
| ||
"Aleph" in hieroglyphs | ||
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The Egyptian "
The
Arabic ʾalif
Written as ا or 𐪑, spelled as ألف or 𐪑𐪁𐪐 and transliterated as alif, it is the first letter in
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 |
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𐪑 |
Arabic variants
Alif mahmūza: أ and إ
The Arabic letter was used to render either a long /aː/ or a
Position in word | Isolated | Final | Medial | Initial |
---|---|---|---|---|
Glyph form: (Help) |
أ | ـأ | ـأ | أ |
The choice of carrier depends on complicated orthographic rules. Alif إ أ is generally the carrier if the only adjacent vowel is fatḥah. 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-kasrah, below it and indicates that the letter so modified is indeed a glottal stop, not a long vowel.
A second type of hamza, hamzat waṣl (همزة وصل) whose diacritic is normally omitted outside of sacred texts, occurs only as the initial letter of the
Position in word | Isolated | Final | Medial | Initial |
---|---|---|---|---|
Glyph form: (Help) |
ٱ | ـٱ | ـٱ | ٱ |
Alif mamdūda: آ
The alif maddah is a double alif, expressing both a glottal stop and a long vowel. Essentially, it is the same as a أا sequence: آ (final ـآ) ’ā /ʔaː/, for example in آخر ākhir /ʔaːxir/ '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."[9] (the "horizontal" alif being the maddah sign).
Alif maqṣūrah: ى
The ى ('limited/restricted alif', alif maqṣūrah), commonly known in Egypt as alif layyinah (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 /aː/, often realized as a short vowel. When it is written, alif maqṣūrah is indistinguishable from final Persian ye or Arabic yā’ as it is written in Egypt, Sudan and sometimes elsewhere.
The letter is transliterated as y in
.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
Position in word | Isolated | Final | Medial | Initial |
---|---|---|---|---|
Glyph form: (Help) |
ى | ـى | ـىـ | ىـ |
Numeral
As a numeral, alif stands for the number one. It may be modified as follows to represent other numbers.[citation needed]
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 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.[10]
Cursive Aramaic | Lapidary Aramaic |
---|---|
Hebrew alef
Hebrew spelling: אָלֶף
In
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
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
Orthographic variants | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|
Various print fonts | Cursive Hebrew |
Rashi script | ||
Serif | Sans-serif | Monospaced | ||
א | א | א |
Rabbinic Judaism
Aleph is the subject of a
In the
Aleph is also the first letter of the
Aleph also begins the three words that make up God's name in
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.
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 [citation needed].
Yiddish
In
- 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 אויך. The digraph וי represents the initial diphthong [oj], 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, אַ, represents the vowel [a] in standard Yiddish.
- An aleph with the diacritic komets, אָ, 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
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 /ʔ/.
In the
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.[12]
Politics
The Mapai political party in Israel used an aleph as its election symbol, and featured it prominently in its campaign posters.[13]
Character encodings
Preview | א | ا | ܐ | ࠀ | 𐎀 | 𐤀 | 𐡀 | 𐫀 | ℵ | |||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Unicode name | HEBREW LETTER ALEF | ARABIC LETTER ALEF | SYRIAC LETTER ALAPH | SAMARITAN LETTER ALAF | UGARITIC LETTER ALPA | PHOENICIAN LETTER ALF | IMPERIAL ARAMAIC LETTER ALEPH | MANICHAEAN LETTER ALEPH | ALEF SYMBOL | |||||||||
Encodings | decimal | hex | dec | hex | dec | hex | dec | hex | dec | hex | dec | hex | dec | hex | dec | hex | dec | hex |
Unicode | 1488 | U+05D0 | 1575 | U+0627 | 1808 | U+0710 | 2048 | U+0800 | 66432 | U+10380 | 67840 | U+10900 | 67648 | U+10840 | 68288 | U+10AC0 | 8501 | U+2135 |
UTF-8 | 215 144 | D7 90 | 216 167 | D8 A7 | 220 144 | DC 90 | 224 160 128 | E0 A0 80 | 240 144 142 128 | F0 90 8E 80 | 240 144 164 128 | F0 90 A4 80 | 240 144 161 128 | F0 90 A1 80 | 240 144 171 128 | F0 90 AB 80 | 226 132 181 | E2 84 B5 |
UTF-16 | 1488 | 05D0 | 1575 | 0627 | 1808 | 0710 | 2048 | 0800 | 55296 57216 | D800 DF80 | 55298 56576 | D802 DD00 | 55298 56384 | D802 DC40 | 55298 57024 | D802 DEC0 | 8501 | 2135 |
Numeric character reference | א |
א |
ا |
ا |
ܐ |
ܐ |
ࠀ |
ࠀ |
𐎀 |
𐎀 |
𐤀 |
𐤀 |
𐡀 |
𐡀 |
𐫀 |
𐫀 |
ℵ |
ℵ |
Named character reference | ℵ, ℵ |
See also
- ʾ
- Al-
- Aleph number
- Arabic yāʼ
- Hamzah
References
- "The Letter Aleph (א)". Hebrew Today. Retrieved 2019-05-05.
- ^ "Oldest alphabet found in Egypt". BBC News. 1999-11-15.
- ^ Goldwasser, O. (2010). "How the Alphabet was Born from Hieroglyphs". Biblical Archaeology Review. 36 (2): 40–53.
- ^ a b "Strong's Hebrew: 504. אֲלָפִים (eleph) -- cattle". biblehub.com. Retrieved 2020-07-31.
- ^ Andersen, F.I.; Freedman, D.N. (1992). "Aleph as a vowel in Old Aramaic". Studies in Hebrew and Aramaic Orthography. Winona Lake, Indiana: Eisenbrauns. pp. 79–90.
- ^ "Meet The Animal That Inspired The Letter A". Everything After Z. Dictionary.com. 2014-10-31. Retrieved 2019-05-05.
- ISBN 0879500034.
- ISBN 90-272-3709-3.
The "aleps" problem in Old Egyptian The character of Egyptian "aleph" (transcribed Ꜣ) has always been debated by linguists and egyptologists. Even at the present we can claim surely only that Egyptian Ꜣ was often not the same as the Semitic glottal stop ɂ.
- ^ Schneider, Thomas (2003). "Etymologische Methode, die Historizität der Phoneme und das ägyptologische Transkriptionsalphabet". Lingua Aegyptia: Journal of Egyptian Language Studies (11): 187–199.
- ISBN 0946621-68-3.
- .
- ^ Weinreich, Uriel (1992). College Yiddish. New York: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. pp. 25–8.
- MR 0553111
- ^ Weitz, Carmel Sapir (2018-07-12). "Symbols of the Mapai Party". The Jerusalem Post. Retrieved 2024-03-06.