Encyclopedia from 1911 Volume 1 of 28   By: Various

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) .