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.