Talk:Aleph

See also Talk:Alif, a hangover from an article redirected here

Article names, scope

Should these articles be moved to the Phoenician titles, treating the Phoenician letters and their immediate descendants (Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic)? Please see Talk:Alif. dab (ᛏ) 10:59, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

Alif

I am confused, why was alif merged into this article? --Knulclunk 13:26, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

I did it based on the previous discussion of having one Phoenician page for each letter and its decendents, except for the the 6 unique Arabic letters (ṯāʼ, ḫāʼ, ḍād, ẓāʼ, ġayn). Epson291 (talk) 07:49, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

So, I can except that you linguists can handle this better than me, but if we want to add an article Alif (band), how should we get to it if someone types in alif and it is redirected to aleph? --Knulclunk (talk) 14:15, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

A disambugation link can be placed at the top of this article (see below of example), or if warented 'Alif' could be a disambugation page instead. Epson291 (talk) 01:57, 27 November 2007 (UTC)

"Alif" redirects here, for other uses, see Alif (disambiguation).

Sounds good. I'll write my stub first, then we can link it in. Thanks!--Knulclunk (talk) 03:41, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

Origin

The origin of aleph is not from Semitic, but from IDE. It's the same word as Latvian galva 'head', and means the same, i.e., 'ox head'. Etymologically aleph < PIE *galuvā 'head'. Roberts7 16:48, 25 February 2008 (UTC)

In Maltese aleph written as 'ghalef' means to feed the animals — Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.133.92.245 (talk) 21:11, 5 September 2013 (UTC)

Arabic "broken alif"

The Arabic "broken alif" should be mentioned. Badagnani (talk) 22:03, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

Done. Badagnani (talk) 20:05, 9 March 2008 (UTC)

Alif mamduda

The Arabic ʼalif mamdūda (ﺁ), which is mentioned in the table at Romanization of Arabic, should be mentioned. Badagnani (talk) 20:41, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

Representations of the letter

This article needs to, like most letter articles do, fill us in on the various Unicode and other representations of the letter.

It should mention the Unicode character you can get by using the symbol character &alefsym; (ℵ) as well as the TeX math markup aleph character <math>\aleph</math> ($\aleph$) used in the aleph number article. The &alfsym; is used, for example, in the real number article, which is the only reason I know about it (that character redirects to aleph number, not here). Can someone fill us in on its Unicode number and the like, and that of the different Unicode aleph character which appears in the Hebrew alphabet (א} (which redirects here, unlike the &alefsym; character), etc. Are there others, perhaps variants in the Hebrew letters block of Unicode?

• $\aleph \,$ math markup
• ℵ Unicode alef symbol for mathematics usage
• א Unicode Hebrew letter aleph
  

Gene Nygaard (talk) 12:07, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Alif madda in Arabic?

What's the name of "alif madda" (آ) in Arabic? Is it ألف مدة?

Questions on the Article

This article requires some serious citations. As accepted as it may or may not be, the Origins section all needs to be cited. Additionally, why is this under WikiProject Judaism? Michael Sheflin (talk) 02:59, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

See Section 3. -- Evertype·✆ 07:07, 25 July 2011 (UTC)

Complaint about chart ordering

Why is arabic the last one but it starts with A? It should be alphabetic. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.119.200.32 (talk) 16:28, 24 July 2011 (UTC)

It reflects the actual historical development of the characters, of course. That should be immediately obvious to anyone. -- Evertype·✆ 07:05, 25 July 2011 (UTC)

Yes, Evertype is correct. HISTORICAL APPEARANCE is the proper criterion for articles such as these, NOT the utterly ARBITRARY and irrelevant fact of alphabetical order. I am shocked that the Wikipowers-that-be have allowed the reordering of ALL of the letter articles on Wikipedia by someone who obviously wants to give preference to Arabic and is using alphabetical order to achieve that goal. It is contrary to how letter articles have appeared on Wikipedia for decades and contrary to the logical custom of following historical developments. ALL WIKIPEDIA ARTICLES SHOULD BE REORDERED TO REFLECT HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENTS. Arabic, being derivative of Syriac and one of the last Semitic languages to appear in history, should be LAST in order and certainly not first. This article is CONFUSING as it is currently presented, and this is currently true of all articles pertaining to letters with Semitic origins.23.247.155.6 (talk) 16:49, 18 December 2016 (UTC)

"... have appeared on Wikipedia for decades ..."? As in 1.5 decades? Largoplazo (talk) 17:09, 18 December 2016 (UTC)

THIS AHISTORICAL TREATMENT AND DISCUSSION OF THE SEMITIC LETTERS REMAINS A PROBLEM THAT NEEDS TO BE FIXED.

Question regarding 'See Also' Entry

Was wondering if it would be OK to add an additional entry directing users to the word Aleph used in William Gibson's "Mona Lisa Overdrive". The 'Aleph' in the story is a bioengineered piece of hardware. A theoretical "Aleph" would have enough memory capacity to literally contain all of reality, enough that a memory construct of a person would contain the complete personality of the individual and allow it to learn, grow and act independently. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Overhere2000 (talk • contribs) 02:15, 29 January 2012 (UTC)

Alef

After the election of Obama, certain mutations have appeared. The correct spelling is Alef. The article should be redirected. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 190.31.140.29 (talk) 13:34, 25 February 2012 (UTC)

Fundamental and factually wrong

It is still astonishing to read these revisions of history that incorrectly restructure the progression of Phoenician directly to Greek, instead of the manufactured fantasy that Phoenician is a "West" Semitic people. The Phoenician peoples split into separate regions, combined with the Greeks through treaty and inter-marriage and were not Semitic (the men were uncircumcised). The "upper" Canaanites were repeatedly at war with Judea and Hebrew history is linked through Aramaic and Greek in a less direct connection. The Hebrew history is the old testament story of Israelites. The Phoenicians are closely related Greek non-Semitic civilization and became part of many different Hellenic peoples and states (in TYRE especially), and with the exception of those went on to found Carthage. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.148.7.28 (talk) 09:33, 14 May 2013 (UTC)

This comment is factually and logically confused. The words "instead of" in the first sentence appear to introduce a rephrase of the original clause, thus making the whole statement inherently self-cancelling. Aside from that fault, the comments that intended to provide proof of concept seem random, questionable, and irrelevant...not to mention arguably wrong.23.247.155.6 (talk) 17:00, 18 December 2016 (UTC)

Ancient South Arabian/Ge'ez Abjad

Soupforone Could you help me develop the Ancient South Arabian/Ge'ez subsections for these abjad pages? Resourcer1 (talk) 18:45, 24 March 2017 (UTC)

Original use?

The lede of the article says "Phonetically, aleph originally represented the onset of a vowel at the glottis." Speaking as a linguist, I can make no sense of this sentence. Is it saying that aleph originated as the representation of a syllable-initial glottal stop? Or something else? Mcswell (talk) 16:24, 9 August 2022 (UTC)

Invalid Unicode

The Arabic section starts "Written as ا or 𐪑, spelled as ألف or 𐪑𐪁𐪐 and..." The boxed characters here are invalid Unicode characters. I could erase them, but it would be better if someone who knew what they were supposed to be replaced them with real Unicode characters. Mcswell (talk) 16:27, 9 August 2022 (UTC)

It works for me. I can see the nabatean letters. Oğuzlar 00:43, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

north arabian* Oğuzlar 00:46, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

"Egyptian alef" listed at Redirects for discussion

A discussion is taking place to address the redirect Egyptian alef. The discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2020 October 8#Egyptian alef until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion. 𝟙𝟤𝟯𝟺𝐪𝑤𝒆𝓇𝟷𝟮𝟥𝟜𝓺𝔴𝕖𝖗𝟰 (𝗍𝗮𝘭𝙠) 13:58, 8 October 2020 (UTC)

Add persian letters

Shouldn't the Inscriptional Pahlavi (Middle Persian) letters be added to this article? For this case, Aleph is 𐭠 in the Inscriptional Pahlavi Alphabet. Oğuzlar 00:42, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

Ox or Bull

Sources vary. Some say it was an ox head, some a bull's head, and some that it was a bull or ox head. This is a surprisingly tricky point. It partly depends upon exactly how one defines ox in English. And on whether the Phoenicians (and others) used different words for bull and ox - which they don't seem to have done. A 'correct'translation of Aleph into English as either bull or ox is therefore not straightforward. 81.6.214.255 (talk) 16:37, 19 August 2025 (UTC)

Funny, I'm sure I've only ever seen it described as "ox". But is it really tricky, and does it even matter at all? It's an abstract representation of the shape of the head of a male bovine. In English we have different words for them according to their fertility status and purpose, so in talking about the letter someone's going to choose one or the other without considering seriously whether one's supposed to read into the simple three-stroke shape whether it has testicles or not. They could probably just have well called it "cow". Largoplazo (talk) 18:35, 19 August 2025 (UTC)

This has nothing to do "how one defines ox in English". We are talking about a Semitic word that starts with this letter, one of the ways of naming of letters of alphabets. How this semitic word translated into english, we have dictionaries for that. (and I am pretty sure, "cow" was named something completely differently :-) --Altenmann >talk 18:51, 19 August 2025 (UTC)

Superscript alif (◌ٰ) is not mentioned

The superscript alif vowel mark (U+0670 ٰ ARABIC LETTER SUPERSCRIPT ALEF, ◌ٰ (Q87500420) ⟨◌ٰ⟩) is not mentioned in the article, but I don't know enough about it to add anything about it. I do note that only certain precomposed characters show up in Unicode, all in the Arabic Presentation Forms A block:

• Ḏāl: U+FC5B ﱛ ARABIC LIGATURE THAL WITH SUPERSCRIPT ALEF ISOLATED FORM
• Rāʾ: U+FC5C ﱜ ARABIC LIGATURE REH WITH SUPERSCRIPT ALEF ISOLATED FORM
• Alif maqṣūrah (isolated): U+FC5D ﱝ ARABIC LIGATURE ALEF MAKSURA WITH SUPERSCRIPT ALEF ISOLATED FORM
• Shaddah: U+FC63 ﱣ ARABIC LIGATURE SHADDA WITH SUPERSCRIPT ALEF ISOLATED FORM
• Alif maqṣūrah (final): U+FC90 ﲐ ARABIC LIGATURE ALEF MAKSURA WITH SUPERSCRIPT ALEF FINAL FORM
• Hāʾ: U+FCD9 ﳙ ARABIC LIGATURE HEH WITH SUPERSCRIPT ALEF INITIAL FORM

It would be good to know more about this mark. — OwenBlacker (he/him; Talk) 20:03, 11 December 2025 (UTC)

There is an article about this, under the title Dagger alif. Yes, it ought to be mentioned in this article. Largoplazo (talk) 21:14, 11 December 2025 (UTC)

Isn't alef a glotal stop in some uses?

As a native Hebrew speaker, I use alef as a glotal stop. Correct me if I'm wrong but, from what I saw it's not mentioned in the Hebrew article or here? ShalevTheDev (talk) 21:23, 13 March 2026 (UTC)

?? It's described as a glottal stop in both the lead section and the "Hebrew alef" section. Largoplazo (talk) 21:27, 13 March 2026 (UTC)