Alf, the Glottal Stop, and What an Abugida Does With It

Alf continues the Semitic glottal stop, and its cognates are the Hebrew aleph, the Syriac alaph and the Arabic alif, all four carrying the same inherited name. In the Northwest Semitic order it stands first and the order is named after it. In the halehame order it is thirteenth.

The letter behaves differently in Ge'ez than in its cousins, and the reason is structural rather than phonetic. In a consonantal script a word beginning with a vowel has no consonant to hang the vowel on, so aleph is pressed into service as a carrier and in time becomes a vowel letter in its own right. Ge'ez never faced the problem. Every consonant sign in the fidel already carries a vowel, so alf in each of its seven orders is simply the glottal stop plus that vowel, and a word beginning with a vowel is written with alf in the appropriate order and needs no special convention.

In the received reading tradition alf and ayn, the letters that wrote the glottal stop and the pharyngeal, sound alike, so the spelling distinction between them is learned rather than heard. Tigrinya readers still make a difference at ayn that Amharic readers do not, so the merger is not complete across the region even now, and a statement about Ge'ez pronunciation has to say whose pronunciation it means.