Alif ا

Alif is the first of the twenty-eight letters of the Arabic script and the simplest in form, a single vertical stroke drawn from the top down. It belongs to the small group of six letters that join only to the right, which means a word containing alif is written as two or more separate connected groups rather than one continuous line. That is not a defect of the script but part of its rhythm, and a calligrapher uses the break an alif creates to set the proportions of a whole line. In the classical system of proportional writing associated with the Abbasid vizier Ibn Muqla, the height of the alif is the unit against which every other letter is measured, and the rhombic mark left by the flat of the pen nib is the unit that measures the alif.

Alif is not a consonant in the way ba or mim are. It writes the long vowel a, and it also acts as the seat for the glottal stop, hamza, which is placed above or below it at the beginning of a word. That double duty makes alif the most frequent letter in written Arabic and the one whose spelling is most argued over, since the rules governing whether a hamza sits on an alif, on a waw, on a ya, or on the line by itself are the hardest part of Arabic orthography.

In the abjad reckoning, in which the letters double as numerals, alif carries the value one. Its name descends from the Northwest Semitic aleph, a word meaning ox, but the sense did not travel with the name. To a reader of Arabic, alif is simply what the letter is called.

The glottal stop is a consonant of Arabic, but the script Arabic inherited from Nabataean Aramaic had no letter for it. The earliest Arabic writing left it unmarked, and that gap is one of the reasons the script needed the reforms of its first two centuries. The solution eventually adopted was to borrow a sign rather than add a letter. A small hook, hamza, described in the grammatical tradition as derived from the head of the letter ayn, is written above or below an existing letter that acts as its seat.

Alif is the commonest of those seats. At the beginning of a word the glottal stop is always carried on an alif, which is why so many Arabic words appear on the page to begin with the same upright stroke while sounding quite different. In the middle and at the end of a word the seat is chosen according to the surrounding vowels, so that one consonant may sit on an alif, on a waw, on an undotted ya, or on nothing at all. Learners meet this as a set of rules to be memorised. Scribes met it as a live question, and manuscripts of the same text differ in the choices they make.

A further complication is that alif also writes the long vowel a, and in some spellings it is silent and purely orthographic, such as the alif written after a plural verb ending. An alif on the page may therefore be a vowel, a consonant seat, or a mark that is not pronounced at all. Reading Arabic aloud depends on knowing the word and not only on decoding the letters, which is one reason the recited tradition and the written one developed alongside each other rather than one out of the other.