A

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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 (alpsa). The earliest authority for this, as for the

names of the other Greek letters, is the grammatical drama

(grammatike Ieoria) 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. 453 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.C.) 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 set-- @, &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).

Fine 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

@, 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

(1) 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 l-sound, as in the English fall,

small, bald, &c. (see Sweet's History of English Sounds,

2nd ed., sec. sec. 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 Madoi), is changed

into Medoi (Medoi), 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. sec. 783).


In English a represents unaccented forms of several

words, e.g. an (one), of, have, he, and or 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 O 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 (q.v.).


In Shipping, A1 is a symbol used to dennote 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.



Source: An unnamed encyclopedia from a project that puts out-of-copyright texts into the public domain.

This is from a *very* old source, and reflects the thinking of the turn of the last century.


-- BryceHarrington