Aramaic Letters: Alap

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The first letter of the Aramaic Alphabet is called Alap, pronounced a-lap, similar to "a lap [round the racetrack]". It corresponds to the Hebrew letter Alef in the Hebrew Alphabet. The letters in the Aramaic Alphabet are almost identical to those in Hebrew, but have slightly different names and sometimes slightly different sounds.

  Aramaic audio: Listen to the sound of Alap.

Here is what the Aramaic letter Alap looks like:

Here is how to write Alap with an ordinary pen:



 
Alap does not have a particular sound of its own, but instead carries the sound of the vowel below or after it. If Alap comes part way through a word, it is pronounced by stopping temporarily and starting again, in a similar way to the English words re-educate or re-do, where there is a slight pause after the initial e sounds. For this reason, Alap is referred to as a guttural letter, meaning that it is pronounced from the throat. Alap, along with the other gutturals, has a number of special properties. We will learn more about the Aramaic gutturals in future lessons.

Aramaic has a method of representing letters as numbers. This system is called Gematria. With Gematria, each Aramaic letter has a numerical equivalent, so that numbers can be written using letters. Alap has the numerical value of 1, since it is the first letter of the Aramaic Alphabet.

Practise writing Alap in the grid lines below:








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