's the reconstructed name of the first letter of the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, continued in descended Semitic alphabets as Phoenician , Syriac ܐ, Hebrew Aleph , and Arabic . Aleph originally represented the glottal stop (IPA /ʔ/), usually transliterated as ʾ (U+02BE) "modifier letter right half ring", a character of the Unicode Spacing Modifier Letters range, based on the Greek spiritus lenis ʼ. For example in the transliteration of the letter name itself, . The Phoenician… (More on Aleph)