A This letter of ours corresponds to the first
symbol in the Phoenician alphabet and in almost all
its descendants. In Phoenician, a, like the symbols for
e and for o, did not represent a vowel, but a
breathing; the vowels originally were not represented by any
symbol. When the alphabet was adopted by the Greeks it was not very
well fitted to represent the sounds of their language. The
breathings which were not required in Greek were accordingly
employed to represent some of the vowel sounds, other vowels, like
i and u, being represented by an adaptation of the symbols for the
semi-vowels y and w. The Phoenician name, which
must have corresponded closely to the Hebrew Aleph, was
taken over by the Greeks in the form Alpha (ccX4a). The earliest authority
for this, as for the names of the other Greek letters, is the
grammatical drama (-ypa��aruci O�wpLa) of Callias, an earlier
contemporary of Euripides, from whose works four trimeters,
containing the names of all the Greek letters, are preserved in Athenaeus x. d.
The form of the letter has varied considerably. In the earliest
of the Phoenician, Aramaic and Greek inscriptions (the oldest
Phoenician dating about 1000 B.C., the oldest Aramaic from the 8th,
and the oldest Greek from the 8th or 7th century B.e.) A
rests upon its side thus - ': In the Greek alphabet of later times
it generally resembles the modern capital letter, but many local
varieties can be distinguished by the shortening of one leg, or by the angle at which the cross
line is &c. From the Greeks of the west the alphabet was
borrowed by the Romans and
from them has passed to the other nations of western Europe. In the earliest Latin inscriptions, such as the
inscription found in the excavation of the Roman Forum in 1899, or that on a golden
fibula found at Praeneste in 1886 (see Alphabet), the letters
are still identical in form with those of the western Greeks. Latin
develops early various forms, which are comparatively rare in
Greek, as or unknown, as /(. Except possibly Faliscan, the other
dialects of Italy did not borrow
their alphabet directly from the western Greeks as the Romans did,
but received it at second hand through the Etruscans. In Oscan,
where the writing of early inscriptions is no less careful than in
Latin, the A takes the form a to which the nearest parallels are found in
north Greece (Boeotia, Locris
and Thessaly, and there
only sporadically) .
In Greek the symbol was used for both the long and the short sound, as in English father
(a) and German Ratte (a); English, except in
dialects, has no sound corresponding precisely to the Greek short
a, which, so far as can be ascertained, was a mid-back-wide sound,
according to the terminology of H. Sweet (Primer of Phonetics, p. 107).
Throughout the history of Greek the short sound remained
practically unchanged. On the other hand, the long sound of a in
the Attic and Ionic dialects
passed into an open e-sound, which in the Ionic alphabet was
represented by the same symbol as the original e-sound (see
Alphabet: Greek). The vowel sounds vary from language to
language, and the a symbol has, in consequence, to represent in
many cases sounds which are not identical with the Greek a whether
long or short, and also to represent several different vowel sounds
in the same language. Thus the New English Dictionary
distinguishes about twelve separate vowel sounds, which are
represented by a in English. In general it may be said that the
chief changes which affect the a-sound in different languages arise
from (I) rounding, (2) fronting, i.e. changing from a
sound produced far back in the mouth to a sound produced farther
forward. The rounding is often produced by combination with rounded
consonants (as in English was, wall, &c.), the
rounding of the preceding consonant being continued into the
formation of the vowel sound. Rounding has also been produced by a
following /-sound, as in the English fall, small, bald,
&c. (see Sweet's History of English Sounds, 2nd ed.,
�� 906, 784). The effect of fronting is seen in the Ionic and Attic
dialects of Greek, where the original name of the Medes,
Madoi, with a in the first syllable (which survives in
Cyprian Greek as Maboc), is changed into Medoi (Mr/Soc),
with an open e-sound instead of the earlier a. In the later history
of Greek this sound is steadily narrowed till it becomes identical
with i (as in English seed). The first part of the process has
been almost repeated by literary English, a (ah) passing
into e (eh), though in present-day pronunciation the
sound has developed further into a diphthongal ei except
before r, as in hare (Sweet, op. cit. �
783).
In English a represents unaccented forms of several words, e.g.
an (one), of, have, he, and of various prefixes the
history of which is given in detail in the New English
Dictionary (Oxford, 1888), vol. i. p. 4. (P. GI.) As a symbol
the letter is used in various connexions and for various technical
purposes, e.g. for a note in music, for the first of the seven dominical
letters (this use is derived from its being the first of the
litterae nundinales at Rome), and generally as a sign of priority.
In Logic, the letter
A is used as a symbol for the universal affirmative proposition in
the general form "all x is y." The letters I, E
and 0 are used respectively for the particular affirmative "some
x is y," the universal negative "no x is
y," and the particular negative "some x is not
y." The use of these letters is generally derived from the
vowels of the two Latin verbs AffIrmo (or AIo), "
I assert," and nEgO, " I deny." The use of the symbols
dates from the 13th century, though some authorities trace their
origin to the Greek logicians. A is also used largely in abbreviations .
In Shipping,
Ai is a symbol used to 'denote quality
of construction and material. In the various shipping registers
ships are classed and given a rating after an official examination,
and assigned a classification mark, which appears in addition to other
particulars in those registers after the name of the ship. See Shipbuilding. It is
popularly used to indicate the highest degree of excellence.
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