Alphabet Letters
Alf (Glottal A) አ
Ge'ez Letters
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Origin Descends from the Ancient South Arabian script; the vocalised seven-order form appears on Aksumite inscriptions of the fourth century CE
Alf is the thirteenth letter of the Ge'ez fidel and writes a glottal stop. Its name is the inherited Semitic word behind Hebrew aleph and Arabic alif, and like them it is a consonant rather than a vowel, though in an abugida every consonant letter already carries a vowel and so alf in its first order is read as a vowel by anyone reading aloud. Alf and ayn, the two glottal and pharyngeal letters, have merged in the received reading tradition, so the distinction between them is now orthographic. Both are written in all seven orders in the ordinary way.
Facts
Attributions
Associated SoundA glottal stop 1Tradition: The Ge'ez script Practice
Liturgical and Scriptural RoleThe script of the Ge'ez liturgy of the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo churches, where the text is chanted rather than read silently 4Tradition: Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Christianity Disputed
Meaning in the Attesting SourceWhy the script was vocalised in the fourth century CE, after centuries of writing consonants alone, is argued and not settled 1Tradition: The Ge'ez script The World's Writing Systems (Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, eds., Oxford University Press, 1996) reviews the Aksumite inscriptions that first show Ge'ez written with vocalisation, a fourth-century CE innovation that is not in dispute, and canvasses three explanations for why it happened then: an internal development inside the Aksumite royal chancery seeking a more precise script for administration; a response to the newly Christian court's need for scripture translated and taught with unambiguous vowels after Aksum's conversion under King Ezana; and influence carried by vocalised Indian scripts reaching the Aksumite court through Red Sea trade contact. Comparing the timing, the epigraphic evidence and the trade record for each explanation, the volume's contributors find none conclusive, since Aksum's fourth-century contacts touched all three at once; the dating of the change is settled, its cause is not. Origins
Origin PeriodDescends from the Ancient South Arabian script; the vocalised seven-order form appears on Aksumite inscriptions of the fourth century CE 1Tradition: The Ge'ez script Place of OriginThe kingdom of Aksum, in the northern highlands of what are now Ethiopia and Eritrea 2Tradition: The Ge'ez script Origin of the NameThe Ge'ez letter names are traditional names carried with the script; some are recognisably the inherited Semitic words and others are not, and the relation of the set as a whole to the Northwest Semitic names is only partly recoverable 1Tradition: The Ge'ez script Transmission
Manuscript TraditionGe'ez scripture and liturgical books are copied by hand on parchment and bound between wooden boards, a practice that has continued without interruption 3Tradition: Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Christianity Open Questions
Sense of the NameNot established for this letter's own name inside the Ge'ez tradition
Alf's own description names Hebrew aleph and Arabic alif as its inherited Semitic cognate but states no sense. The comparative reconstruction credits aleph with the sense ox (already live on Hebrew Aleph), but whether the Ge'ez tradition itself ever attached that sense to the name, rather than only the form, is untested. Identity
Script TypeAn abugida: each base consonant is written in seven vowel orders and is never written without a vowel of its own, which sets the script apart from the consonantal abjads of the rest of the Semitic family 1Tradition: The Ge'ez script PositionThirteenth of twenty-six in the halehame order, the traditional order of the fidel, which is not the inherited Semitic order 1Tradition: The Ge'ez script How the Letter JoinsThe letters do not join, and the script runs left to right, unlike every other Semitic script of comparable age 1Tradition: The Ge'ez script Use
Ritual UseRead, chanted and copied in the Ethiopian and Eritrean churches, and used for the religious texts of the Ethiopian Jewish tradition 3Tradition: Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Christianity Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourceGe'ez numbers are written with a separate set of twenty numeral characters, so no numeral value attaches to a letter and the script has no counterpart to Hebrew gematria or the Arabic abjad reckoning 5Tradition: The Ge'ez script Meaning in the Attesting SourceWritten in seven orders, ge'ez, ka'eb, salis, rabi', hamis, sadis and sabi', which carry the seven vowels of the classical language; the first order is the citation form and the others modify its shape 1Tradition: The Ge'ez script Learn More
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.
Egziabher, Orit, and a Canon of Eighty-One Books
Egziabher, the Ge'ez name for God, begins with this letter in its sixth order, and so does Orit, the name of the opening books of the Ethiopian Old Testament. The first is a compound whose leading element is the ordinary word for lord. The second is a borrowing that has travelled a long way, going back through Greek to the Hebrew torah, and in Ethiopian use it names not the five books of Moses alone but the eight, the Pentateuch together with Joshua, Judges and Ruth, which the tradition treats as one unit.
That is a small clear example of how the Ethiopian canon differs from the canons around it. It counts eighty-one books, it groups them differently, and it includes works no other church received, Enoch and Jubilees among them. Lists of the eighty-one differ from one another in detail, which is itself worth recording: the number is traditional and stable while the contents behind it are not entirely fixed, and an account that gives one list as the list is smoothing over a real variation.
None of this is a variant reading of a familiar canon. It is a separate line of transmission running through Ge'ez, out of a Greek text into a language and a script that then went on working for fifteen centuries without much reference to what Europe was doing. The letter that opens the name of God also opens the name of the first thing in the book.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Related To
Alf and the Syriac alaph continue the Semitic glottal stop and share the inherited name. In Syriac the letter also serves as a vowel carrier, a job a script that writes its vowels on the consonant never needs it for.
Alf and the Hebrew aleph continue the Semitic glottal stop and carry the same inherited name. In Hebrew the letter went on to serve as a vowel sign. In a script that marks its vowels on the consonant, alf never had to.
Sources
1. The World's Writing Systems
Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.), Oxford University Press, 1996View the Source 2. Ancient Churches of Ethiopia: Fourth-Fourteenth Centuries
David W. Phillipson, Yale University Press, 2009
3. Ethiopia and the Bible (The Schweich Lectures 1967)
Edward Ullendorff, Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 1968View the Source 4. Ethiopian Christian Liturgical Chant: An Anthology
Kay Kaufman Shelemay and Peter Jeffery, A-R Editions, 1993
5. The Unicode Standard
Comparative Dictionary of Ge'ez (Classical Ethiopic)
Wolf Leslau, Otto Harrassowitz, 1987
Open Questions (1 open question)
Do the Ge'ez letter names carry a sense inside Ge'ez, or are they inherited forms only?
A few Ge'ez letter names are transparently words in the language: bet is a house, gaml is a camel, and the word behind res is the word for a head. Most are not, and several, nahas among them, resemble Ge'ez words closely enough to invite a gloss that nothing supports. The atlas records no meaning for those letters, which is a statement about the evidence and leaves open whether the Ethiopian tradition itself ever attached senses to them.
What would resolve this A survey of the Ge'ez grammatical and church-school literature for any indigenous account of the letter names, set against the comparative reconstruction of the Northwest Semitic names, would show whether an Ethiopian gloss tradition exists and what it says.
Ethiopian philology and the history of the traditional church schoolsDivinity Atlas Open Questions Register, First Edition
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