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. Despite the name it does not correspond to an aleph in cognate Semitic words, where the single 'reed' hieroglyph is found instead. 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. 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).įurther information: Transliteration of Ancient Egyptian § alef 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'.

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. Aleph is often transliterated as U+02BE ʾ, based on the Greek spiritus lenis ʼ for example, in the transliteration of the letter name itself, ʾāleph.

When this practice began is the subject of some controversy, though it had become well established by the late stage of Old Aramaic (ca. In later Semitic languages, aleph could sometimes function as a mater lectionis indicating the presence of a vowel elsewhere (usually long). 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 Arabic, the alif represents the glottal stop pronunciation when it is the initial letter of a word. 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 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.

Phonetically, aleph originally represented the onset of a vowel at the glottis. 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. 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 word for ox (compare Biblical Hebrew אֶלֶף‎ ʾelef, 'ox' ). It also appears as South Arabian 𐩱 and Ge'ez ʾälef አ. Aleph (or alef or alif, transliterated ʾ) is the first letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician ʾālep 𐤀, Hebrew ʾālef א, Aramaic ʾālap 𐡀, Syriac ʾālap̄ ܐ, Arabic ʾalif ا, and North Arabian 𐪑.

Ancient egyp glyph meanings