Aleph (o Alef o alif , transcrito ' ) es la primera letra de los abjads semíticos , incluyendo fenicia 'ālep 𐤀 , hebreo 'ālef א , arameo 'ālap 𐡀 , siríaco 'ālap̄ ܐ y árabe alif ا . También aparece como de Arabia del Sur 𐩱 y Ge'ez ʾälef አ .
Aleph Apuesta → | |
---|---|
Fenicio | |
hebreo | א |
arameo | |
Siríaco | ܐ |
Arábica | ا |
Representación fonémica | ʔ , una |
Posición en el alfabeto | 1 |
Valor numérico | 1 |
Derivados alfabéticos del fenicio | |
griego | Α |
latín | A , Ɑ |
cirílico | А , Я , Ѣ |
Se cree que estas letras derivan de un jeroglífico egipcio que representa la cabeza de un buey [1] para describir el sonido inicial de la palabra semítica occidental para buey, [2] conservada en hebreo bíblico como Eleph 'buey'. [3] La variante fenicia dio lugar a la griega alfa ( Α ), siendo re-interpretados para expresar no la consonante glotal pero el acompañamiento vocal , y por lo tanto la América A y cirílico А .
En fonética , aleph / ɑː l ɛ f / originalmente representada la aparición de una vocal en la glotis . En las lenguas semíticas, esto funciona como una consonante débil que permite conjugar raíces con solo dos consonantes verdaderas a la manera de una raíz semítica estándar de tres consonantes. En la mayoría de los dialectos hebreos, así como en el siríaco, el inicio glotal representado por aleph es la ausencia de una consonante verdadera, aunque una oclusión glótica ( [ ʔ ] ), que es una consonante verdadera, suele aparecer como un alófono. En árabe, el alif tiene la pronunciación de la oclusión glótica cuando ocurre inicialmente. En el texto con signos diacríticos, la pronunciación como oclusión glotal suele indicarse con una marca especial, hamza en árabe y mappiq en hebreo tiberiano. (Aunque alguna vez se pensó que era la pronunciación original de aleph en todos los casos en los que se comporta como una consonante, una oclusión glotal constante parece haber estado ausente en antiguas lenguas semíticas como el acadio y el ugarítico, además de estar ausente en siríaco y hebreo). el aleph también se usó para indicar una vocal átona inicial antes de ciertos grupos de consonantes, sin funcionar como una consonante en sí, el aleph protésico (o protético) . En las lenguas semíticas posteriores, aleph a veces podría funcionar como un mater lectionis que indica la presencia de una vocal en otra parte (generalmente larga). El período en el que comenzó el uso como mater lectionis es objeto de cierta controversia, aunque se había establecido bien en la etapa tardía del arameo antiguo (ca. 200 a. C.). Aleph a menudo se transcribe como U + 02BE ʾ , basado en el griego spiritus lenis ʼ ; por ejemplo, en la transliteración del nombre de la letra en sí, ʾāleph . [4]
Origen
El nombre aleph se deriva de la palabra semítica occidental para " buey " (como en la palabra hebrea bíblica Eleph (אֶלֶף) 'buey' [3] ), y la forma de la letra deriva de un glifo proto-sinaítico que puede haber sido basado en un jeroglífico egipcio
, que representa la cabeza de un buey. [5]
Jeroglífico | Proto-Sinaítico | Fenicio | Paleo-hebreo | ||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
En árabe estándar moderno , la palabra أليف / ʔaliːf / significa literalmente 'domesticado' o 'familiar', derivado de la raíz | ʔ-lf | , del cual el verbo ألِف / ʔalifa / significa 'estar familiarizado con; estar en términos íntimos con '. [6] En hebreo moderno, la misma raíz | ʔ-lp | (alef-lamed-peh) da me'ulaf , el participio pasivo del verbo le'alef , que significa 'adiestrado' (cuando se refiere a mascotas) o 'domesticado' (cuando se refiere a animales salvajes); el rango de las FDI de aluf , tomado de un título de nobleza edomita , también es análogo. [ aclaración necesaria ]
Egipcio antiguo
"Aleph" | ||
---|---|---|
Jeroglíficos egipcios |
El jeroglífico egipcio " buitre " ( Gardiner G1 ), por convención pronunciado [a] ) también se conoce como aleph , sobre la base de que tradicionalmente se ha tomado para representar una oclusión glotal , aunque algunas sugerencias recientes [7] [8] tienden a hacia un sonido aproximado alveolar ( [ ɹ ] ) en su lugar. A pesar del nombre, no corresponde a un aleph en palabras semíticas afines, donde en su lugar se encuentra el jeroglífico de "caña".
El fonema se transcribe comúnmente por un símbolo compuesto por dos medios anillos, en Unicode (a partir de la versión 5.1, en el rango D extendido latino ) codificado en U + A722 Ꜣ LETRA LATINA MAYÚSCULA EGIPTOLOGICA ALEF y U + A723 ꜣ LETRA LATINA MINÚSCULA ALEF EGIPTOLÓGICO . Una representación alternativa es el número 3 , o el carácter del inglés medio ȝ Yogh ; ninguno debe ser preferido a los genuinos personajes egiptológicos.
arameo
El reflejo arameo de la letra se representa convencionalmente con la א hebrea en la tipografía por conveniencia, pero la forma gráfica real varió significativamente a lo largo de la larga historia y la amplia extensión geográfica del idioma. Maraqten identifica tres tradiciones alef diferentes en las monedas de Arabia Oriental: una forma lapidaria en arameo que la realiza como una combinación de una forma de V y un trazo recto unido al ápice, muy parecido a una K latina; una forma aramea cursiva que él llama la "forma X elaborada", esencialmente la misma tradición que el reflejo hebreo ; y una forma extremadamente cursiva de dos líneas oblicuas cruzadas, muy parecida a una X latina simple. [9]
Arameo cursiva | Arameo lapidario |
---|---|
hebreo
Está escrito como א y como אָלֶף .
En el hebreo israelí moderno , la letra representa una oclusión glotal ( [ ʔ ] ) o indica un hiato (la separación de dos vocales adyacentes en sílabas distintas , sin consonante intermedia ). A veces es silencioso (palabra-finalmente siempre, palabra-medialmente a veces: הוּא [hu] "él", רָאשִׁי [ʁaʃi] "principal", רֹאשׁ [ʁoʃ] "cabeza", רִאשׁוֹן [ʁiʃon] "primero"). La pronunciación varía en las diferentes divisiones étnicas judías .
In gematria, aleph represents the number 1, and when used at the beginning of Hebrew years, it means 1000 (e.g. א'תשנ"ד in numbers would be the Hebrew date 1754, not to be confused with 1754 CE).
Aleph, along with ayin, resh, he and heth, cannot receive a dagesh. (However, there are few very rare examples of the Masoretes adding a dagesh or mappiq to an aleph or resh. The verses of the Hebrew Bible for which an aleph with a mappiq or dagesh appears are Genesis 43:26, Leviticus 23:17, Job 33:21 and Ezra 8:18.)
In Modern Hebrew, the frequency of the usage of alef, out of all the letters, is 4.94%.
Aleph is sometimes used as a mater lectionis to denote a vowel, usually /a/. That use is more common in words of Aramaic and Arabic origin, in foreign names, and some other borrowed words.
Orthographic variants | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|
Various Print Fonts | CursiveHebrew | RashiScript | ||
Serif | Sans-serif | Monospaced | ||
א | א | א |
Rabbinic Judaism
Aleph is the subject of a midrash that praises its humility in not demanding to start the Bible. (In Hebrew, the Bible begins with the second letter of the alphabet, bet.) In the story, aleph is rewarded by being allowed to start the Ten Commandments. (In Hebrew, the first word is אָנֹכִי, which starts with an aleph.)
In the Sefer Yetzirah, the letter aleph is king over breath, formed air in the universe, temperate in the year, and the chest in the soul.
Aleph is also the first letter of the Hebrew word emet ( אֶמֶת), which means truth. In Jewish mythology, it was the letter aleph that was carved into the head of the golem that ultimately gave it life.
Aleph also begins the three words that make up God's mystical name in Exodus, I Am who I Am (in Hebrew, Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh אהיה אשר אהיה), and aleph is an important part of mystical amulets and formulas.
Aleph, in Jewish mysticism, represents the oneness of God. The letter can be seen as being composed of an upper yud, a lower yud, and a vav leaning on a diagonal. The upper yud represents the hidden and ineffable aspects of God while the lower yud represents God's revelation and presence in the world. The vav ("hook") connects the two realms.
Jewish mysticism relates aleph to the element of air, the Fool (Key 0, value 1) of the major arcana of the tarot deck,[10] and the Scintillating Intelligence (#11) of the path between Kether and Chokmah in the Tree of the Sephiroth[citation needed].
Yiddish
In Yiddish,[11] aleph is used for several orthographic purposes in native words, usually with different diacritical marks borrowed from Hebrew niqqud:
- With no diacritics, aleph is silent; it is written at the beginning of words before vowels spelled with the letter vov or yud. For instance, oykh 'also' is spelled אויך. The digraph וי represents the initial diphthong [oj], but that digraph is not permitted at the beginning of a word in Yiddish orthography, so it is preceded by a silent aleph. Some publications use a silent aleph adjacent to such vowels in the middle of a word as well when necessary to avoid ambiguity.
- An aleph with the diacritic pasekh, אַ, represents the vowel [a] in standard Yiddish.
- An aleph with the diacritic komets, אָ, represents the vowel [ɔ] in standard Yiddish.
Loanwords from Hebrew or Aramaic in Yiddish are spelled as they are in their language of origin.
Siríaco Alaph / Olaf
Alaph |
---|
Madnḫaya Alap |
Serṭo Olaph |
Esṭrangela Alap |
In the Syriac alphabet, the first letter is ܐ, Classical Syriac: ܐܵܠܲܦ, alap (in eastern dialects) or olaph (in western dialects). It is used in word-initial position to mark a word beginning with a vowel, but some words beginning with i or u do not need its help, and sometimes, an initial alap/olaph is elided. For example, when the Syriac first-person singular pronoun ܐܵܢܵܐ is in enclitic positions, it is pronounced no/na (again west/east), rather than the full form eno/ana. The letter occurs very regularly at the end of words, where it represents the long final vowels o/a or e. In the middle of the word, the letter represents either a glottal stop between vowels (but West Syriac pronunciation often makes it a palatal approximant), a long i/e (less commonly o/a) or is silent.
Árabe del Sur / Ge'ez
In the Ancient South Arabian alphabet, 𐩱 appears as the seventeenth letter of the South Arabian abjad. The letter is used to render a glottal stop /ʔ/.
In the Ge'ez alphabet, ʾälef አ appears as the thirteenth letter of its abjad. This letter is also used to render a glottal stop /ʔ/.
South Arabian | Ge'ez |
---|---|
𐩱 | አ |
Arábica
Written as ا, spelled as ألف and transliterated as alif, it is the first letter in Arabic. Together with Hebrew aleph, Greek alpha and Latin A, it is descended from Phoenician ʾāleph, from a reconstructed Proto-Canaanite ʾalp "ox".
Alif is written in one of the following ways depending on its position in the word:
Position in word: | Isolated | Final | Medial | Initial |
---|---|---|---|---|
Glyph form: (Help) | ا | ـا | ـا | ا |
Arabic variants
Alif with hamza: أ and إ
The Arabic letter was used to render either a long /aː/ or a glottal stop /ʔ/. That led to orthographical confusion and to the introduction of the additional letter hamzat qaṭ‘ ﺀ. Hamza is not considered a full letter in Arabic orthography: in most cases, it appears on a carrier, either a wāw (ؤ), a dotless yā’ (ئ), or an alif.
Position in word: | Isolated | Final | Medial | Initial |
---|---|---|---|---|
Glyph form: (Help) | أ | ـأ | ـأ | أ |
The choice of carrier depends on complicated orthographic rules. Alif إ أ is generally the carrier if the only adjacent vowel is fatḥah. It is the only possible carrier if hamza is the first phoneme of a word. Where alif acts as a carrier for hamza, hamza is added above the alif, or, for initial alif-kasrah, below it and indicates that the letter so modified is indeed a glottal stop, not a long vowel.
A second type of hamza, hamzat waṣl (همزة وصل), occurs only as the initial letter of the definite article and in some related cases. It differs from hamzat qaṭ‘ in that it is elided after a preceding vowel. Again, alif is always the carrier.
Position in word: | Isolated | Final | Medial | Initial |
---|---|---|---|---|
Glyph form: (Help) | ٱ | ـٱ | ـٱ | ٱ |
Alif maddah: آ
The alif maddah is a double alif, expressing both a glottal stop and a long vowel. Essentially, it is the same as a أا sequence: آ (final ـآ) ’ā /ʔaː/, for example in آخر ākhir /ʔaːxir/ 'last'.
Position in word: | Isolated | Final | Medial | Initial |
---|---|---|---|---|
Glyph form: (Help) | آ | ـآ | ـآ | آ |
"It has become standard for a hamza followed by a long ā to be written as two alifs, one vertical and one horizontal."[12] (the "horizontal" alif being the maddah sign).
Alif maqṣūrah: ى
The ى, ('limited/restricted alif', alif maqṣūrah), commonly known in Egypt as alif layyinah (ألف لينة, 'flexible alif'), looks like a dotless yā’ ى (final ـى) and may appear only at the end of a word. Although it looks different from a regular alif, it represents the same sound /aː/, often realized as a short vowel. When it is written, alif maqṣūrah is indistinguishable from final Persian ye or Arabic yā’ as it is written in Egypt, Sudan and sometimes elsewhere.
Position in word: | Isolated | Final |
---|---|---|
Glyph form: (Help) | ى | ـى |
- Note: as it can only occur as the last letter of a word, its initial and medial forms are undefined.
Alif maqsurah is transliterated as á in ALA-LC, ā in DIN 31635, à in ISO 233-2 and ỳ in ISO 233.
Numeral
As a numeral, alaph/olaf stands for the number one. With a dot below, it is the number 1,000; with a line above it, alaph/olaf will represent 1,000,000. With a line below it is 10,000 and with two dots below it is 10,000,000.
Otros usos
Mathematics
In set theory, the Hebrew aleph glyph is used as the symbol to denote the aleph numbers, which represent the cardinality of infinite sets. This notation was introduced by mathematician Georg Cantor. In older mathematics books, the letter aleph is often printed upside down by accident, partly because a Monotype matrix for aleph was mistakenly constructed the wrong way up.[13]
Codificaciones de caracteres
Preview | א | ا | ܐ | ࠀ | 𐎀 | 𐤀 | ℵ | 𐫀 | ||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Unicode name | HEBREW LETTER ALEF | ARABIC LETTER ALIF | SYRIAC LETTER ALAPH | SAMARITAN LETTER ALAF | UGARITIC LETTER ALPA | PHOENICIAN LETTER ALF | ALEF SYMBOL | MANICHAEAN LETTER ALEPH | ||||||||
Encodings | decimal | hex | decimal | hex | decimal | hex | decimal | hex | decimal | hex | decimal | hex | decimal | hex | decimal | hex |
Unicode | 1488 | U+05D0 | 1575 | U+0627 | 1808 | U+0710 | 2048 | U+0800 | 66432 | U+10380 | 67840 | U+10900 | 8501 | U+2135 | 68288 | U+10AC0 |
UTF-8 | 215 144 | D7 90 | 216 167 | D8 A7 | 220 144 | DC 90 | 224 160 128 | E0 A0 80 | 240 144 142 128 | F0 90 8E 80 | 240 144 164 128 | F0 90 A4 80 | 226 132 181 | E2 84 B5 | 240 144 171 128 | F0 90 AB 80 |
UTF-16 | 1488 | 05D0 | 1575 | 0627 | 1808 | 0710 | 2048 | 0800 | 55296 57216 | D800 DF80 | 55298 56576 | D802 DD00 | 8501 | 2135 | 55298 57024 | D802 DEC0 |
Numeric character reference | א | א | ا | ا | ܐ | ܐ | ࠀ | ࠀ | 𐎀 | 𐎀 | 𐤀 | 𐤀 | ℵ | ℵ | 𐫀 | 𐫀 |
Named character reference | ℵ, &aleph |
Ver también
- ʾ
- Al-
- Aleph number
- Arabic yāʼ
- "The Aleph", a short story by Jorge Luis Borges describing a point in space that contains all other spaces at once
- Hamzah
- Aleph (novel)
Referencias
- "The Letter Aleph (א)". Hebrew Today. Retrieved 2019-05-05.
- ^ "Oldest alphabet found in Egypt". BBC News. November 15, 1999.
- ^ Goldwasser, O. (2010). "How the Alphabet was Born from Hieroglyphs". Biblical Archaeology Review. 36 (2): 40–53.
- ^ a b "Strong's Hebrew: 504. אֲלָפִים (eleph) -- cattle". biblehub.com. Retrieved 2020-07-31.
- ^ Andersen, F.I.; Freedman, D.N. (1992). "Aleph as a vowel in Old Aramaic". Studies in Hebrew and Aramaic Orthography. Winona Lake, Indiana: Eisenbrauns. pp. 79–90.
- ^ "Meet The Animal That Inspired The Letter A". Everything After Z. Dictionary.com. Retrieved 2019-05-05.
- ^ Wehr, Hans (1994). A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic: (Arabic-English) (4th ed.). Urbana: Spoken Language Services. pp. 28–29. ISBN 0879500034.
- ^ Lecarme, Jacqueline; Lowenstamm, Jean; Shlonsky, Ur (2000). Research in Afroasiatic Grammar: Papers from the Third Conference on Afroasiatic Languages, Sophia Antipolis, France, 1996. John Benjamins. p. 345. ISBN 90-272-3709-3.
The "aleps" problem in Old Egyptian The character of Egyptian "aleph" (transcribed Ꜣ) has always been debated by linguists and egyptologists. Even at the present we can claim surely only that Egyptian Ꜣ was often not the same as the Semitic glottal stop ɂ.
- ^ Schneider, Thomas (2003). "Etymologische Methode, die Historizität der Phoneme und das ägyptologische Transkriptionsalphabet". Lingua Aegyptia: Journal of Egyptian Language Studies (11): 187–199.
- ^ Maraqten, Mohammed (1996). "Notes on the Aramaic script of some coins from East Arabia". Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy. 7 (2): 304–315. doi:10.1111/j.1600-0471.1996.tb00107.x.
- ^ "Tarot Journey with Leisa ReFalo". tarotjourney.net. Archived from the original on 2010-07-04. Retrieved 2010-06-21.
- ^ Weinreich, Uriel (1992). College Yiddish. New York: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. p. 25–8.
- ^ Jones, Alan (2005). Arabic Through The Qur'an. Cambridge: The Islamic Texts Society. p. 4. ISBN 0946621-68-3.
- ^ Swanson, Ellen; O'Sean, Arlene Ann; Schleyer, Antoinette Tingley (1999) [1979], Mathematics into type. Copy editing and proofreading of mathematics for editorial assistants and authors (updated ed.), Providence, R.I.: American Mathematical Society, p. 16, ISBN 0-8218-0053-1, MR 0553111