Alaf ࠀ

Alaf holds the first place in the twenty-two letter sequence the Samaritan alphabet shares with Hebrew, Aramaic and Syriac, and it takes the numeral value one from that position rather than from anything about the letter itself. The sign wrote a glottal stop in the older language, the catch heard at the front of a word that begins with a vowel. In the Samaritan reading tradition alaf is one of four letters, with iy, it and in, whose consonants have weakened, so in practice it is often sounded as a light catch or not at all, and the vowel that follows it carries the syllable on its own.

Its grammatical work is heavier than its sound. Alaf prefixes the first person singular of the imperfect verb, so it opens every I shall and I will form in the Torah. It stands at the end of a large class of words in the Aramaic the community also writes, and inside a word it can mark a vowel rather than a consonant, a role it took on precisely because its own consonant was slight.

When Greek scribes adapted the alphabet from Phoenician they had no glottal stop to write and gave the sign to the vowel a, which is how a Semitic consonant came to be the first letter of the Greek, Latin and Cyrillic alphabets. Alaf and alpha are the same inherited sign put to two different uses, and the Samaritan letter is the one that stayed with the job it was made for.

In the character standard the letter heads the Samaritan block at U+0800, under the name the community uses for it rather than the Hebrew one, and the twenty-one letters that follow run in unbroken order from there.

The order that puts alaf first is older than any script that uses it, and it is one of the most conservative facts in the history of writing. Abecedaries, practice lists of the signs written out in sequence by learners, survive from sites across the Levant, and they show the same run of letters in the same order that a Samaritan child is taught today. Nothing about the sequence follows from the sounds. It was inherited, and every alphabet that borrowed the signs borrowed the order along with them, adding whatever new letters it needed at the end rather than in the middle. That is why Greek alpha, beta, gamma tracks alaf, bit, gaman, and why the letters Greek invented for itself sit at the back behind tau.

The order does real work rather than merely recording a habit. It fixes the numeral value of every letter, so a scribe numbering the sections of a manuscript is relying on a list nobody chose. It underwrites the alphabetic acrostic, the poetic form in which each unit of a poem begins with the next letter of the alphabet, which is only possible where the sequence is fixed and known to everybody. And it is the frame the letters are taught in: an alphabet is recited before it is read, and a community that has kept a script in use as long as the Samaritans have has kept the recitation going beside it.

What the sequence does not carry is meaning. The gloss attached to alaf, an ox, is argued backwards from the letter name rather than recorded by anyone writing the script, and the atlas marks it as a modern reconstruction wherever it appears in the Northwest Semitic alphabets.