Aleph is the first letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician 'Ālep Phoenician aleph.svg, Hebrew 'Ālef א, Aramaic Ālap Aleph.svg, Syriac ʾĀlap̄ ܐ, and Arabic Alif ا. The Phoenician letter is derived from an Egyptian hieroglyphs which depicts an ox's head[1] 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 /ˈɑːlɛf/ 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.