the vowel in standard Yiddish. An aleph with the diacritic komets, אָ, represents the vowel in standard Yiddish. Loanwords from Hebrew or Aramaic in Yiddish are spelled as they are in their language of origin. Syriac Alaph/Olaf In the Syriac alphabet, the first letter is , , 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 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. South Arabian/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 . 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 . Arabic Written as or 𐪑, spelled as or 𐪑𐪁𐪐 and transliterated as , it is the first letter in Arabic and North Arabian. Together with Hebrew aleph, Greek alpha and Latin A, it is descended from Phoenician , from a reconstructed Proto-Canaanite "ox". Alif is written in one of the following ways depending on its position in the word: Arabic variants Alif with hamza: and The Arabic letter was used to render either a long or a glottal stop . That led to orthographical confusion and to the introduction of the additional letter . Hamza is not considered a full letter in Arabic orthography: in most cases, it appears on a carrier, either a (), a dotless (), or an alif. The choice of carrier depends on complicated orthographic rules. Alif is generally the carrier if the only adjacent vowel is . 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-, below it and