A | |
---|---|
A a | |
Usage | |
Writing system | Latin script |
Type | Alphabetic |
Language of origin | Latin language |
Phonetic usage | |
Unicode codepoint | U+0041, U+0061 |
Alphabetical position | 1 |
History | |
Development | |
Time period | c. 700 BCE –present |
Descendants | |
Sisters | |
Other | |
Other letters commonly used with | a(x), ae, eau, au |
Writing direction | Left-to-right |
ISO basic Latin alphabet |
---|
Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo Pp Qq Rr Ss Tt Uu Vv Ww Xx Yy Zz |
A, or a, is the first letter and the first vowel letter of the Latin alphabet, [1] [2] used in the modern English alphabet, and others worldwide. Its name in English is a (pronounced /ˈeɪ/ AY), plural aes. [nb 1] [2]
It is similar in shape to the Ancient Greek letter alpha, from which it derives. [3] The uppercase version consists of the two slanting sides of a triangle, crossed in the middle by a horizontal bar. The lowercase version can be written in two forms: the double-storey ⟨a⟩ and single-storey ⟨ɑ⟩. The letter is commonly used in handwriting and fonts based on it, especially fonts intended to be read by children, and is also found in italic type.
In English, a is the indefinite article, with the alternative form an.
In English, the name of the letter is the long A sound, pronounced /ˈeɪ/ . Its name in most other languages matches the letter's pronunciation in open syllables.
The earliest known ancestor of "A" is aleph —the first letter of the Phoenician alphabet, also written 'aleph [4] —where it represented a glottal stop [ʔ], as Phoenician only used consonantal letters. In turn, the ancestor of aleph may have been a pictogram of an ox head in proto-Sinaitic script [5] influenced by Egyptian hieroglyphs, styled as a triangular head with two horns extended.
When the ancient Greeks adopted the alphabet, they had no use for a letter representing a glottal stop—so they adapted sign to represent the vowel /a/, calling the letter by the similar name alpha . In the earliest Greek inscriptions dating to the 8th century BC following the Greek Dark Ages, the letter rests upon its side. However, in the later Greek alphabet it generally resembles the modern capital form—though 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 brought the Greek alphabet to the Italian Peninsula, and left the form of alpha unchanged. When the Romans adopted the Etruscan alphabet to write Latin, the resulting form used in the Latin script would come to be used to write many other languages, including English.
Egyptian | Proto-Sinaitic | Proto-Canaanite | Phoenician | Western Greek | Etruscan | Latin |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
During Roman times, there were many variant forms of the letter A. First was the monumental or lapidary style, which was used when inscribing on stone or other more permanent media. There was also a cursive style used for everyday or utilitarian writing, which was done on more perishable surfaces. Due to the perishable nature of these surfaces, there are not as many examples of this style as there are of the monumental, but there are still many surviving examples of different types of cursive, such as majuscule cursive, minuscule cursive, and semi-cursive minuscule. Variants also existed that were intermediate between the monumental and cursive styles. The known variants include the early semi-uncial, the uncial, and the later semi-uncial. [6]
Blackletter | Uncial | |
Roman | Italic | Script |
At the end of the Roman Empire (5th century AD), several variants of the cursive minuscule developed through Western Europe. Among these were the semi-cursive minuscule of Italy, the Merovingian script in France, the Visigothic script in Spain, and the Insular or Anglo-Irish semi-uncial or Anglo-Saxon majuscule of Great Britain. By the ninth century, the Caroline script, which was very similar to the present-day form, was the principal form used in book-making, before the advent of the printing press. This form was derived through a combining of prior forms. [6]
15th-century Italy saw the formation of the two main variants that are known today. These variants, the Italic and Roman forms, were derived from the Caroline Script version. The Italic form ⟨ɑ⟩, also called script a, is often used in handwriting; it consists of a circle with a vertical stroke on its right. In the hands of medieval Irish and English writers, this form gradually developed from a 5th-century form resembling the Greek letter tau ⟨τ⟩. [4] The Roman form ⟨a⟩ is found in most printed material, and consists of a small loop with an arc over it. [6] Both derive from the majuscule form ⟨A⟩. 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 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. Graphic designers refer to the Italic and Roman forms as single-decker a and double decker a respectively.
Italic type is commonly used to mark emphasis or more generally to distinguish one part of a text from the rest set in Roman type. There are some other cases aside from italic type where script a⟨ɑ⟩, also called Latin alpha , is used in contrast with Latin ⟨a⟩, such as in the International Phonetic Alphabet.
Orthography | Phonemes |
---|---|
Standard Chinese (Pinyin) | /a/ |
English | /æ/, /ɑː/, /ɒ/, /ɔː/, /ɛː/ , /eɪ/, /ə/ |
French | /a/, /ɑ/ |
German | /a/, /aː/ |
Portuguese | /a/, /ɐ/ |
Saanich | /e/ |
Spanish | /a/ |
Turkish | /a/ |
In modern English orthography, the letter ⟨a⟩ represents at least seven different vowel sounds, here represented using the vowels of Received Pronunciation, with effects of ⟨r⟩ ignored and mergers in General American mentioned where relevant:
The double ⟨aa⟩ sequence does not occur in native English words, but is found in some words derived from foreign languages such as Aaron and aardvark . [8] However, ⟨a⟩ occurs in many common digraphs, all with their own sound or sounds, particularly ⟨ai⟩, ⟨au⟩, ⟨aw⟩, ⟨ay⟩, ⟨ea⟩ and ⟨oa⟩.
⟨a⟩ is the third-most-commonly used letter in English after ⟨e⟩ and ⟨t⟩, as well as in French; it is the second most common in Spanish, and the most common in Portuguese. ⟨a⟩ represents approximately 8.2% of letters as used in English texts; [9] the figure is around 7.6% in French [10] 11.5% in Spanish, [11] and 14.6% in Portuguese. [12]
In most languages that use the Latin alphabet, ⟨a⟩ denotes an open unrounded vowel, such as /a/, /ä/, or /ɑ/. An exception is Saanich, in which ⟨a⟩—and the glyph ⟨ Á ⟩—stands for a close-mid front unrounded vowel /e/.
The Latin letters ⟨A⟩ and ⟨a⟩ have Unicode encodings U+0041ALATIN CAPITAL LETTER A and U+0061aLATIN SMALL LETTER A. These are the same code points as were used in ASCII and ISO 8859. There are also precomposed character encodings for ⟨A⟩ and ⟨a⟩ with diacritics, for most of those listed above; the remainder are produced using combining diacritics.
Variant forms of the letter have unique code points for specialist use: the alphanumeric symbols set in mathematics and science, Latin alpha in linguistics, and halfwidth and fullwidth forms for legacy CJK font compatibility. The Cyrillic and Greek homoglyphs of the Latin ⟨A⟩ have separate encodings U+0410А CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER A and U+0391Α GREEK CAPITAL LETTER ALPHA.
Alpha is the first letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of one. Alpha is derived from the Phoenician letter aleph , which is the West Semitic word for "ox". Letters that arose from alpha include the Latin letter A and the Cyrillic letter А.
E, or e, is the fifth letter and the second vowel letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is e ; plural es, Es or E's.
Epsilon is the fifth letter of the Greek alphabet, corresponding phonetically to a mid front unrounded vowel IPA:[e̞] or IPA:[ɛ̝]. In the system of Greek numerals it also has the value five. It was derived from the Phoenician letter He . Letters that arose from epsilon include the Roman E, Ë and Ɛ, and Cyrillic Е, È, Ё, Є and Э.
O, or o, is the fifteenth letter and the fourth vowel letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is o, plural oes.
R, or r, is the eighteenth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ar, plural ars, or in Ireland or.
S, or s, is the nineteenth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ess, plural esses.
T, or t, is the twentieth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is tee, plural tees.
Æ is a character formed from the letters a and e, originally a ligature representing the Latin diphthong ae. It has been promoted to the status of a letter in some languages, including Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese. It was also used in Old Swedish before being changed to ä. The modern International Phonetic Alphabet uses it to represent the near-open front unrounded vowel. Diacritic variants include Ǣ/ǣ, Ǽ/ǽ, Æ̀/æ̀, Æ̂/æ̂ and Æ̃/æ̃.
Ä is a character that represents either a letter from several extended Latin alphabets, or the letter A with an umlaut mark or diaeresis. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, it represents the open central unrounded vowel.
In writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more graphemes or letters are joined to form a single glyph. Examples are the characters ⟨æ⟩ and ⟨œ⟩ used in English and French, in which the letters ⟨a⟩ and ⟨e⟩ are joined for the first ligature and the letters ⟨o⟩ and ⟨e⟩ are joined for the second ligature. For stylistic and legibility reasons, ⟨f⟩ and ⟨i⟩ are often merged to create ⟨fi⟩ ; the same is true of ⟨s⟩ and ⟨t⟩ to create ⟨st⟩. The common ampersand, ⟨&⟩, developed from a ligature in which the handwritten Latin letters ⟨e⟩ and ⟨t⟩ were combined.
The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BC. It is derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and was the earliest known alphabetic script to have distinct letters for vowels as well as consonants. In Archaic and early Classical times, the Greek alphabet existed in many local variants, but, by the end of the 4th century BC, the Euclidean alphabet, with 24 letters, ordered from alpha to omega, had become standard and it is this version that is still used for Greek writing today.
А is a letter of the Cyrillic script. It commonly represents an open central unrounded vowel, halfway between the pronunciation of ⟨a⟩ in "cat" and "father". The Cyrillic letter А is romanized using the Latin letter A.
Unicode has subscripted and superscripted versions of a number of characters including a full set of Arabic numerals. These characters allow any polynomial, chemical and certain other equations to be represented in plain text without using any form of markup like HTML or TeX.
Latin alpha, script a, or single-story a, is a letter of the Latin alphabet based on one lowercase form of a, or on the Greek lowercase alpha (α).
L, or l, is the twelfth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is el, plural els.
Unicode supports several phonetic scripts and notations through its existing scripts and the addition of extra blocks with phonetic characters. These phonetic characters are derived from an existing script, usually Latin, Greek or Cyrillic. Apart from the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), extensions to the IPA and obsolete and nonstandard IPA symbols, these blocks also contain characters from the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet and the Americanist Phonetic Alphabet.
I, or i, is the ninth letter and the third vowel letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is i, plural ies.
B, or b, is the second letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is bee, plural bees.
Dania is the traditional linguistic transcription system used in Denmark to describe the Danish language. It was invented by Danish linguist Otto Jespersen and published in 1890 in the Dania, Tidsskrift for folkemål og folkeminder magazine from which the system was named.
The Latin turned alpha, also known as the turned script A, is an additional letter of the Latin script, based on letters A and Latin alpha (Ɑ). Its lowercase variant is used in International Phonetic Alphabet, Americanist phonetic notation, Uralic Phonetic Alphabet, Teuthonista, Swedish Dialect Alphabet, Dania, and Norvegia transcriptions. Its uppercase variant is used in the Americanist phonetic notation. The letter also appears in Belter Creole, a constructed language made by Nick Farmer for The Expanse television sci-fi series.
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