Aleph
Aleph is the first letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician 'Ālep , Hebrew 'Ālef א, Aramaic Ālap , Syriac ʾĀlap̄ ܐ, and Arabic Alif ا.
The Phoenician letter is derived from an Egyptian hieroglyph depicting an ox's head and gave rise to the Greek Alpha (Α), being re-interpreted to express not the glottal consonant but the accompanying vowel, and hence the Latin A and Cyrillic А.
In phonetics, aleph originally represented the glottal stop ([ʔ]), often transliterated as U+02BE ʾ , based on the Greek spiritus lenis ʼ, for example, in the transliteration of the letter name itself, ʾāleph. Even in early use, it occasionally functioned to indicate an initial unstressed vowel before certain consonant clusters, the prosthetic (or prothetic) aleph. In later Semitic languages it could sometimes function as a mater lectionis indicating the presence of a vowel elsewhere (usually long). The period at which use as a mater lectionis began is the subject of some controversy, though it had become well established by the late stage of Old Aramaic (ca. 200 BCE).