A

From Encyclopædia

A/a is the first letter of the English alphabet and of almost all alphabets derived from the ancient Semitic writing system. Both the form of the letter and its position at the beginning of the alphabet are from the Latin alphabet, which derived it from the Greek by way of the Etruscan.The Greeks call the letter alpha. Its name, form, and position were taken by them, along with the rest of the alphabet, from a Semitic writing system--probably Phoenician but possibly Aramaic. In Semitic writing systems, the name of the sign is aleph; there, it does not represent a vowel but rather a consonant similar to the glottal stop (a sound produced by closing the gap between the vocal chords) that precedes the emphatic pronunciation of initial vowels in English (all, in, out, up).In English, the letter a stands for a number of vowel sounds, as in bald, father, fat, any, fate, and soda.The double a does not occur in native English words but is found in some words (aardvark, kraal, and Aaron) taken from languages that have this sequence.I. J. Gelb and R. M. WhitingG