Elif

The name Elif reaches back to the first letter of an alphabet. Its short meaning is exactly that: the first letter. In Hebrew that letter is aleph, and aleph passed into Arabic as alif, the upright stroke that opens the script. Turkish took the same letter and turned it into a girl's name, Elif, one of the most common names given to daughters in Turkey.

The Polish gloss names it precisely: pierwsza litera alfabetu arabskiego, the first letter of the Arabic alphabet.

Because alif is drawn as a single vertical line, poets in the Ottoman world borrowed elif as a picture of a slender, upright form. That association came later. The origin is a letter and nothing more.

A Polish child called Elif meets her name on a class register, spelled the way it sounds. There is no diminutive, no variant to soften it. Four letters, one syllable of Turkish laid over the Hebrew aleph, and the plain fact that she is named for the beginning of writing.