The Letter A

A is the first letter of most European alphabets, including English.

It is derived through letters of the Latin and Etruscan alphabets from the Greek alpha, and the English capital A retains the Greek and Roman lapidary form. The Greeks, who learned the art of writing from the Phoenicians, borrowed this letter from the Semites. Indeed, whereas the Greek name is meaningless, the Semitic name, aleph, is a word in the Semitic languages meaning ‘ox’.

The modern letter A is of Etruscan origin. The small ‘a’, in both its forms, italic a and roman a, derives from the Caroline form (employed in the Frankish empire at the end of the 8th century), which in its turn descended from the semi-uncial book-hand.

The Venetian minusculae, nowadays known as italics (introduced in Florence in the 15th century), and the Roman type of letter (perfected in northern Italy, chiefly at Venice, where it was used in the printing presses about the end of the 15th century), were adopted in England, from Italy, in the 16th century. The black letter or Gothic, also developed from the Caroline (at the end of the 12th century), and employed in northwestern Europe, including England, until the 16th century, was still in general use in Germany until the late 1940s.

The Semitic aleph was (and still is, for instance, in Hebrew) a consonant, not a vowel. Its sound was that of a glottal stop or a neutral vowel, represented by the A as in aboard, aground, etc. The Greeks adopted the symbol to represent what is now the general Continental pronunciation of A, that is, an open vowel like that of father. In English spelling, A corresponds to any of seven or more vowel sounds, as in mat, mate, squad, water, father, allow, many; depending on the speaker’s accent, this list may also be supplemented by one or more of bad, cast, village, farm.

The expression ‘short A’ commonly refers in English to the vowel of mat, which is a front open unrounded monophthong; ‘long A’ refers to that of mate, a front unrounded mid-to-close diphthong. Words like cast, path vary regionally and socially between ‘short A’ and the ‘broad A’ of father, a central or back unrounded open monophthong.