The letter A is the first letter A letter is an element in an alphabetic system of writing, such as the Greek alphabet and its descendants. Each letter in the written language is usually associated with one phoneme in the spoken form of the language in the Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. It evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was borrowed and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome, whose alphabet was then adapted and further modified by the ancient, a vowel In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as English ah! [ɑː] or oh! [oʊ], pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, such as English sh! [ʃː], where there is a constriction or closure at some point along the vocal tract. A. Its name in English English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into South-East Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria. Following the economic, political, military, scientific, cultural, and colonial influence of Great Britain and the United Kingdom from the 18th century, and of ( / ˈ eɪ /) is spelled ‹a›; the plural is aes, although this is rare.[1] A is also similar to the Ancient Greek letter Alpha Alpha is the first letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 1. It was derived from the Phoenician letter Aleph . Letters that arose from Alpha include the Latin A and the Cyrillic letter А of which it is based on.
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Origins
"A" can be traced to a pictogram A pictograph is an ideogram that conveys its meaning through its pictorial resemblance to a physical object. Earliest examples of pictographs include ancient or prehistoric drawings or paintings found on rock walls. Pictographs are also used in writing and graphic systems in which the characters are to considerable extent pictorial in appearance of an ox An ox or bullock (Australia, New Zealand, India) is a bovine animal trained as a draft animal. Oxen are commonly adult, castrated male cattle, but cows (adult females) or bulls (entire males) may also be used in some areas. Oxen are used for plowing, transport (pulling carts or wagons or sometimes for riding), threshing grain by trampling, and for head in Egyptian hieroglyph Egyptian hieroglyphs (pronounced /ˈhaɪrəɡlɪf/ was a formal writing system used by the ancient Egyptians that contained a combination of logographic and alphabetic elements. Egyptians used cursive hieroglyphics for religious literature on papyrus and wood. Less formal variations of the script, called hieratic and demotic, are technically not or the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet The Proto-Sinaitic script, also known as Proto-Canaanite, is the alphabetic script of a number of Middle Bronze Age inscriptions in the Sinai, Middle Egypt, and Canaan. It is ancestral to the Semitic abjads as they developed by the Early Iron Age, and via Phoenician and Aramaic also to nearly all modern alphabets.[2]
In 1600 B.C. the Phoenician alphabet The Phoenician alphabet, called by convention the Proto-Canaanite alphabet for inscriptions older than around 1050 BC, was a non-pictographic consonantal alphabet, or abjad. It was used for the writing of Phoenician, a Northern Semitic language, used by the civilization of Phoenicia. It has been classified as an abjad because it records only's letter had a linear form that served as the base for some later forms. Its name must have corresponded closely to the Hebrew The Hebrew alphabet , known variously by scholars as the Jewish script, square script, block script, and because of its place of origin, the Assyrian script (not to be confused with the Syriac alphabet). The alphabet is used in the writing of the Hebrew language, as well as other Jewish languages, most notably Yiddish, Ladino, and Judeo-Arabic or Arabic The Arabic alphabet or Arabic abjad is the script used for writing several languages of Asia and Africa, such as Arabic and Urdu. After the Latin alphabet, it is the second-most widely used alphabet around the world aleph ʾĀlep is the reconstructed name of the first letter of the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, continued in descended Semitic alphabets as Phoenician Aleph , Syriac 'Ālaph ܐ, Hebrew Aleph א, and Arabic ʾAlif ا.
When the Ancient Greeks Ancient Greece is the civilization belonging to the period of Greek history lasting from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to 146 BC and the Roman conquest of Greece after the Battle of Corinth. At the center of this time period is Classical Greece, which flourished during the 5th to 4th centuries BC, at first under Athenian adopted the alphabet, they had no use for the glottal stop The glottal stop, or more fully, the voiceless glottal plosive, is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages. In English the feature is represented for example by the hyphen in uh-oh! and by the apostrophe or ʻokina in Hawaiʻi among those attempting an authentic pronunciation of that name that the letter had denoted in Phoenician Phoenician was a language originally spoken in the coastal region then called "Pūt" in Ancient Egyptian, "Canaan" in Phoenician, Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic, and "Phoenicia" in Greek and Latin. Phoenician is a Semitic language of the Canaanite subgroup; its closest living relative is Hebrew. The area where Phoenician and other Semitic languages The Semitic languages are a group of related languages whose living representatives are spoken by more than 467 million people across much of the Middle East, North Africa and the Horn of Africa. They constitute a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. The most widely spoken Semitic language by far today is Arabic . It is followed by Amharic (2, so they used the sign to represent the vowel /a/, and kept its name with a minor change (alpha Alpha is the first letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 1. It was derived from the Phoenician letter Aleph . Letters that arose from Alpha include the Latin A and the Cyrillic letter А). In the earliest Greek inscriptions after the Greek Dark Ages The Greek Dark Age or Ages are terms which have regularly been used to refer to the period of Greek history from the presumed Dorian invasion and end of the Mycenaean Palatial civilization around 1200 BC, to the first signs of the Greek city-states in the 9th century BC. These terms are gradually going out of use, since the former lack of, dating to the 8th century BC, the letter rests upon its side, but in the Greek alphabet The Greek alphabet is a set of twenty-four letters that has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BC. It is the first and oldest alphabet in the narrow sense that it notes each vowel and consonant with a separate symbol. It is as such in continuous use to this day. The letters were also used to represent of later times it generally resembles the modern capital letter, although many local varieties can be distinguished by the shortening of one leg, or by the angle at which the cross line is set.
The Etruscans Etruscan civilization is the modern English name given to a civilization of ancient Italy in an area corresponding roughly to Tuscany, whom the ancient Romans called Etrusci or Tusci. Their Roman name is the origin of the names of Tuscany, their heartland, and Etruria, their wider region brought the Greek alphabet to their civilization in the Italian Peninsula The Italian Peninsula or Apennine Peninsula is one of the three large peninsulas of Southern Europe (the other two being the Iberian Peninsula and Balkan Peninsula), spanning 1,000 km from the Po Valley in the north to the central Mediterranean Sea in the south. The peninsula's shape gives it the nickname Lo Stivale (The Boot). Three smaller and left the letter unchanged. The Romans later adopted the Etruscan alphabet Old Italic refers to several now extinct alphabet systems used on the Italian Peninsula in ancient times for various Indo-European languages and non-Indo-European (e.g. Etruscan) languages. The alphabets derive from the Euboean Greek Cumaean alphabet, used at Ischia and Cumae in the Bay of Naples in the eighth century BC to write the Latin language Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. With the Roman conquest, Latin was spread to countries around the Mediterranean, including a large part of Europe. Romance languages such as Aragonese, Corsican, Catalan, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Sardinian, Spanish and others, are descended from Latin, while, and the resulting letter was preserved in the modern Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. It evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was borrowed and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome, whose alphabet was then adapted and further modified by the ancient used to write many languages, including English English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into South-East Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria. Following the economic, political, military, scientific, cultural, and colonial influence of Great Britain and the United Kingdom from the 18th century, and of.
Typographic variants include a double-story and single-story a.The letter has two minuscule Lower case , minuscule, or small letters are the smaller form of letters, as opposed to upper case or capital letters, as used in European alphabets (Greek, Latin, Cyrillic, and Armenian). For example, the letter "a" is lower case while the letter "A" is upper case (lower-case) forms. The form used in most current handwriting Penmanship or handwriting is the art of writing with the hand and a writing instrument. Styles of handwriting are also called hands or scripts consists of a circle and vertical stoke ("ɑ"), called Latin alpha Latin alpha or script a, is a letter of the Latin alphabet, based on one lowercase form of a, or on the Greek lowercase alpha (α). Although normally the letter a admits variation, it must be carefully distinguished from ɑ where both are used or "script a". Most printed material uses a form consisting of a small loop with an arc over it ("a"). Both derive from the majuscule Capital letters or majuscules [IPA pronunciation: /məˈdʒʌskjuls, ˈmædʒəˌskjuls/], in the Roman alphabet A, B, C, D, etc., may also be called capitals, or caps. Upper case, upper-case, or uppercase is also often used in this context as synonym of capital. Manual typesetters kept them in the upper drawers of a desk or in the upper type case, (capital) form. In Greek handwriting, it was common to join the left leg and horizontal stroke into a single loop, as demonstrated by the Uncial version shown. Many fonts then made the right leg vertical. In some of these, the serif In typography, serifs are semi-structural details on the ends of some of the strokes that make up letters and symbols. A typeface that has serifs is called a serif typeface . A typeface without serifs is called sans-serif, from the French sans, meaning “without”. Some typography sources refer to sans-serif typefaces as "grotesque" ( that began the right leg stroke developed into an arc, resulting in the printed form, while in others it was dropped, resulting in the modern handwritten form.
Usage
In English, "a" by itself frequently denotes the near-open front unrounded vowel The near-open front unrounded vowel is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is æ, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is {. The IPA symbol is the lowercase ae ligature, and both the symbol and the sound are commonly referred to as "ash" (/æ/) as in pad, the open back unrounded vowel The open back unrounded vowel is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ɑ, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is A. The symbol ɑ is called script a because it lacks the extra hook on top of a printed letter a, which corresponds to a different vowel, the (/ɑː/) as in father, or, in concert with a later orthographic vowel, the diphthong /eɪ/ as in ace and major, due to effects of the great vowel shift The Great Vowel Shift was a major change in the pronunciation of the English language that took place in the south of England between 1450 and 1750. The Great Vowel Shift was first studied by Otto Jespersen , a Danish linguist and Anglicist, who coined the term.
In most other languages that use the Latin alphabet, "a" denotes an open front unrounded vowel The open front unrounded vowel is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is a, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is a (/a/). In the International Phonetic Alphabet, variants of "a" denote various vowels In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as English ah! [ɑː] or oh! [oʊ], pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, such as English sh! [ʃː], where there is a constriction or closure at some point along the vocal tract. A. In X-SAMPA The Extended Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet is a variant of SAMPA developed in 1995 by John C. Wells, professor of phonetics at the University of London. It is designed to unify the individual language SAMPA alphabets, and extend SAMPA to cover the entire range of characters in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). The result is, capital "A" denotes the open back unrounded vowel The open back unrounded vowel is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ɑ, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is A. The symbol ɑ is called script a because it lacks the extra hook on top of a printed letter a, which corresponds to a different vowel, the and lowercase "a" denotes the open front unrounded vowel The open front unrounded vowel is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is a, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is a.
"A" is the third common used letter in English, and the second most common in Spanish Countries where Spanish has official status. States of the U.S. where Spanish has no official status but is spoken by 25% or more of the population. States of the U.S. where Spanish has no official status but is spoken by 10-20% of the population. States of the U.S. where Spanish has no official status but is spoken by 5-9.9% of the population and French French is a Romance language spoken as a first language by about 136 million people worldwide. Around 190 million people speak French as a second language, and an additional 200 million speak it as an acquired foreign language. French speaking communities are present in 57 countries and territories. Most native speakers of the language live in. In one study, on average, about 3.68% of letters used in English tend to be ‹a›s, while the number is 6.22% in Spanish and 3.95% in French.[3]
"A" is often used to denote something or someone of a better or more prestigious quality or status: A-, A or A+, the best grade that can be assigned by teachers for students' schoolwork; A grade for clean restaurants; A-List The A-list is a term that alludes to major movie stars, and/or the most bankable in the Hollywood movie industry celebrities, etc. Such associations can have a motivating Motivation is the activation or energization of goal-orientated behavior. Motivation is said to be intrinsic or extrinsic. The term is generally used for humans but, theoretically, it can also be used to describe the causes for animal behavior as well. This article refers to human motivation. According to various theories, motivation may be rooted effect as exposure to the letter A has been found to improve performance, when compared with other letters.[4]
A turned "a" ("ɐ") is used by the International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet [note 1] is a system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin alphabet, devised by the International Phonetic Association as a standardized representation of the sounds of spoken language. The IPA is used by foreign language students and teachers, linguists, speech pathologists and therapists, singers, for the near-open central vowel The near-open central vowel is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ɐ, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is 6. The IPA symbol is an upside-down printed letter 'a', while a turned capital "A" ("∀") is used in predicate logic In mathematical logic, predicate logic is the generic term for symbolic formal systems like first-order logic, second-order logic, many-sorted logic or infinitary logic. This formal system is distinguished from other systems in that its formulas contain variables which can be quantified. Two common quantifiers are the existential ∃ and universal to specify universal quantification.
Alternative representations of A| NATO phonetic | Morse code |
| Alpha | ·– |
| Signal flag | Flag semaphore | Braille |
Codes for computing
In Unicode, the capital "A" is codepoint U+0043 and the lower case "a" is U+0061.[5]
The ASCII code for capital "A" is 65 and for lower case "a" is 97; or in binary 01000001 and 01100001, respectively.
The EBCDIC code for capital "A" is 193 and for lowercase "a" is 129; or in binary 11000001 and 10000001, respectively.
The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "A" and "a" for upper and lower case, respectively.
See also
| Wikimedia Commons has media related to: A |
| Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article A. |
References
- ^ "A" Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989). Aes is the plural of the name of the letter. The plural of the letter itself is As, A's, as, a's.
- ^ "A". The World Book Encyclopedia. 1. Field Enterprises, Inc. 1956. p. 1.
- ^ "Percentages of Letter frequencies per Thousand words". http://starbase.trincoll.edu/~crypto/resources/LetFreq.html. Retrieved 2006-05-01.
- ^ Letters affect exam results. British Psychological Society. 9 March 2010. http://www.sciencealert.com.au/news/20100903-20689.html
- ^ "Javascript Unicode Chart" (in en). http://macchiato.com/unicode/chart/. Retrieved 2009-03-08.
External links
| Look up A in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. |
| The basic modern Latin alphabet | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aa | Bb | Cc | Dd | Ee | Ff | Gg | Hh | Ii | Jj | Kk | Ll | Mm | Nn | Oo | Pp | Rr | Ss | Tt | Uu | Vv | Ww | Xx | Yy | Zz | |
|
Letter A with diacritics
Áá
Àà
Ăă
Ắắ
Ằằ
Ẵẵ
Ẳẳ
Ââ
Ấấ
Ầầ
Ẫẫ
Ẩẩ
Ǎǎ
Åå
Ǻǻ
Ää
Ǟǟ
Ãã
Ȧȧ
Ǡǡ
Ąą
Āā
Ảả
Ȁȁ
Ȃȃ
Ạạ
Ặặ
Ậậ
Ḁḁ
Ⱥⱥ
ᶏ
Ɐɐ
Ɑɑ
history • palaeography • derivations • diacritics • punctuation • numerals • Unicode • list of letters • ISO/IEC 646 |
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Categories: Latin letters | Vowel letters
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