English hebrew transliteration3/18/2024 ![]() ![]() 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 □ and Ge'ez ʾälef አ. Aleph (or alef or alif, transliterated ʾ) is the first letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician ʾālep □, Hebrew ʾālef א, Aramaic ʾālap □, Syriac ʾālap̄ ܐ, Arabic ʾalif ا, and North Arabian □. ![]()
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