Alaph ܐ

Alaph is the first letter of the Syriac abjad, and the entry here names the letter itself rather than any one drawing of it. Estrangela, Serto and Madnhaya write the same twenty-two letters in three different hands, and alaph is drawn differently in each while remaining one letter with one place in the sequence. It joins only to the right, so whatever follows it begins a fresh connected group and a word containing alaph is broken into more than one run.

The consonant it once wrote is the glottal stop, and in Syriac that stop is very often silent. The letter then stands as the seat of a vowel rather than as a consonant of its own, which is why a word that begins with a vowel sound begins with alaph on the page. The reader supplies the vowel from the pointing, or from knowing the word.

Its name continues the Northwest Semitic noun for an ox, the same word that stands behind Hebrew aleph and, through the Phoenician sequence the Greeks borrowed, behind alpha. The ox belongs to the pictures of the older linear alphabet and not to anything in the Syriac shape, which has travelled through centuries of cursive writing and keeps the connection in its name alone.

Alaph also closes a great many Syriac nouns, because the emphatic state, the form in which a noun is ordinarily cited, ends in a long a written with this letter. Final alaph is therefore one of the commonest sights on a Syriac page and one of the first cues a learner uses.

An abjad records consonants and leaves the vowels to the reader, and Syriac has two separate answers to the problem of writing them down anyway. The eastern hand marks vowels with arrangements of dots placed above and below the line. The western hand writes small Greek vowel letters over the consonants, a borrowing that records how closely Syriac scholarship stood to Greek learning in the centuries when the systems were fixed. Both are additions to a script that had worked without them for a long time, and ordinary running text still leaves them off and expects the reader to supply what is missing.

Alaph is where that problem is sharpest. Because its own consonant is so often silent, a word beginning with alaph begins, to the ear, with a vowel, and the letter is holding a place for a sound it does not itself write. Nothing on the page distinguishes one such vowel from another unless the pointing is present. A reader who knows the language does not notice the gap; a reader learning it notices very little else.

Alaph also carries the numeral value one. Syriac letters double as figures, so alaph opens the units in the same way it opens the alphabet, and a scribe numbering the leaves and quires of a manuscript begins with it. The two jobs sit on one sign without interfering, because a figure is marked as a figure by the way it is written into the line rather than by any change to the letter.