Aleph

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.

In most Hebrew dialects as well as Syriac, the aleph is an absence of a true consonant, a glottal stop ([ʔ]), the sound found in the catch in uh-oh.

In later Semitic languages, aleph could sometimes function as a mater lectionis indicating the presence of a vowel elsewhere (usually long).

The Egyptian "vulture" hieroglyph (Gardiner G1), by convention pronounced [a]) is also referred to as aleph, on grounds that it has traditionally been taken to represent a glottal stop ([ʔ]), although some recent suggestions[7][8] tend towards an alveolar approximant ([ɹ]) sound instead.

Despite the name it does not correspond to an aleph in cognate Semitic words, where the single "reed" hieroglyph is found instead.

Written as ا or 𐪑, spelled as ألف or 𐪑𐪁𐪐 and transliterated as alif, it is the first letter in Arabic and North Arabian.

Together with Hebrew aleph, Greek alpha and Latin A, it is descended from Phoenician ʾāleph, from a reconstructed Proto-Canaanite ʾalp "ox".

That led to orthographical confusion and to the introduction of the additional marking hamzat qaṭ‘ 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 wāw (ؤ), a dotless yā’ (ئ), or an alif.

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 definite article and in some related cases.

[citation needed] 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.

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 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.

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].

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.

[12] The Mapai political party in Israel used an aleph as its election symbol, and featured it prominently in its campaign posters.