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Encyclopedia from 1911 Volume 1 of 28 By: Various |
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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... Continue reading book >>
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