| 释义 |
aleph|ˈɑːləf, ˈæləf, -ɛf|
Also 4 Allef, 5–7 Alephe, and with capital initial.
[a. Heb. and Phoenician āleph, lit. ‘ox’; the character may have developed from the hieroglyph of an ox's head: see alpha.]
1. The name of the first letter of the Phoenician and Hebrew alphabets, whence it came to be used in a number of Semitic languages to represent the glottal stop; in post-biblical Hebrew, the numeral 1.
c1300South-Eng. Leg. ‘Infancy of Christ’ (Laud) (1878) 800 Ȝwi was Allef furst bi founde? Of alle lettres he is þe furste. c1400Mandeville Trav. (1725) 132 The Lettres, that the Jewes usen..and the names..in manere of here A.B.C...Alephe. 1677T. Herbert Trav. (ed. 4) 124 The first verse of the first chapter of Genesis where the letter Alephe is six times found. 1875Encycl. Brit. I. 608/2 The Phoenician alphabet consisted of twenty-eight letters, which for convenience we may call by the names of their Hebrew equivalents. These were (1) Aleph (2) Beth, (3) Gimel, [etc.]. 1944Auden For Time Being (1945) 67 O where is the garden of Being that is only known in Existence As the command to be never there, the sentence by which Alephs of throbbing fact have been banished into position. 1976J. F. A. Sawyer Mod. Introd. Biblical Hebrew 8 The Alphabet... Aleph not pronounced, except between vowels where it stands for a glottal stop.
2. Math. A transfinite cardinal number; aleph-null, aleph-zero, the smallest such number, the cardinal of the set of integers. [Adopted in this sense, as G. alef, by G. Cantor 1895, in Math. Ann. XLVI. 492.]
[1903B. Russell Princ. of Math. xxxvii. 309 The number of finite numbers..is transfinite. This number Cantor denotes by the Hebrew Aleph with the suffix 0; for us it will be more convenient to denote it by a0.] 1913Athenæum 3 May 497/1 The authors deal with..the construction of Cantor's aleph-numbers. 1915P. E. B. Jourdain tr. Cantor's Contrib. Theory Transfinite Numbers 103 (heading) The smallest transfinite cardinal number aleph-zero. 1920A. S. Eddington Space, Time & Gravitation iii. 59 It reminds us of the mathematicians' transfinite number Aleph; you can subtract any number you like from it and it still remains the same. 1963B. S. Johnson Travelling People i. 19 It would be a noble achievement to find the square root of aleph one... He began looking now: square roots he knew about, a little, but aleph one meant very little to him. 1969H. Horwood Newfoundland iii. 11 A poetic equation with black and white as its limits..the aleph-null of a transfinite reality. 1979Sci. Amer. Nov. 29/2 The continuum hypothesis..states that there is no infinite number between aleph-null (the number of positive integers) and aleph-one (the number of real numbers). |