A (named a /ˈeɪ/, plural aes) is the first letter and a vowel in the ISO basic Latin alphabet. It is similar to the Ancient Greek letter Alpha, from which it derives.
The earliest certain ancestor of "A" is aleph (also called 'aleph), the first letter of the Phoenician alphabet (which, by consisting entirely of consonants, is an abjad rather than a true alphabet). In turn, the origin of aleph may have been a pictogram of an ox head in Egyptian hi...
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A (named a /ˈeɪ/, plural aes) is the first letter and a vowel in the ISO basic Latin alphabet. It is similar to the Ancient Greek letter Alpha, from which it derives.
The earliest certain ancestor of "A" is aleph (also called 'aleph), the first letter of the Phoenician alphabet (which, by consisting entirely of consonants, is an abjad rather than a true alphabet). In turn, the origin of aleph may have been a pictogram of an ox head in Egyptian hieroglyphs.
In 1600 B.C., the Phoenician alphabet's letter had a linear form that served as the base for some later forms. Its name must have corresponded closely to the Hebrew or Arabic aleph.
When the ancient Greeks adopted the alphabet, they had no use for the glottal stop—the first phoneme of the Phoenician pronunciation of the letter, and the sound that the letter denoted in Phoenician and other Semitic languages—so they used an adaptation of the sign to represent the vowel /a/, and gave it the similar name of alpha. In the earliest Greek...
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