Talk:A/Archive 2

. (The first letter of the modern English alphabet.)

(Any of the speech sounds represented by the letter a.) )The first in a series. Something shaped like the letter A)

Note: Is not A also a word, although it is not always quite clear what it is used for?

a fake to nit and to eat and apelh

"In 1600 B.C. the Phoenician alphabet's letter had a linear form that served as the base for some later forms. Its name must have corresponded closely to the Hebrew or Arabic aleph."

Its name "must have?" Really? Because if it "must have," then it did. This should be replaced with "may have" or "likely" or something like this, unless the point is definite, in which case "must have" should just be removed.

"Yes...It's Raining" 01:32, 17 December 2010 (UTC)

Source

A, a is the first letter of our alphabet. It was the first letter in the first known alphabet, which dates from about 1850 B.C. It was used by a people called Seirites, who lived on the Sinai Peninsula north of the Red Sea. They took this letter from Egyptian drawings of the head of an ox. The Phoenicians, who lived in the eastern Mediterranean area, also made A the first letter in their alphabet. They named it aleph, which means ox. The Phoenician A looked less like an ox head, and more like the A of the present-day alphabet. The Greeks took the letter into their alphabet and called it alpha. They made slight changes in its shape. The shape of the letter was changed again when it passed into the Roman alphabet.

In the Seirite and Phoenician alphabets, A stood for a light breathing sound, which was not used in pronouncing the letter in the later alphabets. A stands for six main sounds in the English alphabet. Examples of these sounds are found in the words name, bare, man, father, water, and want.

The World Book Encyclopedia. Copyright 1956. Volume 1. Page 1.

Luckynumbers (talk) 09:44, 15 February 2008 (UTC)

What do the first four sentences have anything to do with what you wrote? Αδελφος (talk) 16:06, 4 December 2009 (UTC)

Nothing, this was vandalism. I reverted the statement. Adam850 (talk) 03:58, 13 January 2010 (UTC)

Lower-case forms error

In the sentence following "The letter has two minuscule (lower-case) forms.", the first example, the Unicode one, is the wrong character and is the same as the second example. Given that we do not know what fonts people are using when reading Wikipedia, it may make more sense to have the text point to the illustrations to the bottom right of this passage instead of trying to put the characters inline. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 18:27, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

Frequency Table

The article indicates the frequency of the letter A in the english alphabet to be 8% or so, but the citation that this number is taken from has the actual frequency as 3.5%. I am not sure which is correct, but there is certainly an incosistancy here that needs to be resolved. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.248.9.194 (talk) 04:51, 25 July 2008 (UTC)

Google

Searching the word "a" on Google racks up over 20 billion results, double of what the search engine gives for the word "I." --69.230.75.87 (talk) 00:37, 14 January 2011 (UTC)

So you were bored?--86.6.234.40 (talk) 13:21, 3 September 2011 (UTC)

Historical development of the letter A graph

Shouldn't we only include the capital letter Alpha, since the lowercase alpha was invented in the 8th Century (common era)? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.191.211.54 (talk) 19:37, 28 August 2009 (UTC)

Usage Addition

There is no mention how it appears in a number of mathematics and electronics. If someone looks up the term wondering how it relates to the electronics they purchased, they should have a quick definition/ link to look up. AF Cadet & EE Student (talk) 13:00, 14 September 2009 (UTC)

NATO phonetic

The NATO phonetic should be spelled Alfa, this is done to avoid confusion with non-english speakers who do not pronounce "ph" as "f". —Preceding unsigned comment added by Toxicredm (talk • contribs) 04:13, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

There is a problem with the template that apparently is been addressed.

Until then we must keep the spelling Alpha until the problem in common has been resolved. FFMG (talk) 07:31, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

simply note 'pronunciation' along with the standard spelling. XM8 Carbine (talk) 10:47, 31 March 2010 (UTC)

Angle brackets

I'm just curious, why are angle brackets being used on this page? Adam850 (talk) 03:59, 13 January 2010 (UTC)

"technical restraints"

The first line, "Due to technical restraints," doesn't sound right to me. Surely it should be 'technical constraints' or 'technical restrictions' which is what the link refers to. Chris97 (talk) 21:15, 26 April 2010 (UTC)

Fixed. Used "restrictions" Peaceoutside (talk) 03:25, 25 August 2010 (UTC)

FUN FACT

The average human uses the letter a when they speak 750,230 a day

So the "average human" speaks English as a mother tongue?--F. F. Fjodor (talk) 19:00, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

No they don't, this person is talking about English speakers 110.20.130.141 (talk) 19:43, 29 January 2014 (UTC).

"infant" a

I couldn't find this in Wikipedia (except for one sentence in Gill Sans#Characteristics), maybe it even deserves its own article: Single-story a and g are also called infant characters[1][2] because of the belief that they are easier to read, and have been used in children's books for that reason. Research has shown that children don't actually find double-story or serif characters more difficult to read.[3]--88.73.9.255 (talk) 22:12, 23 March 2011 (UTC)

"forms/script"?

About this revert of an edit of mine by User:Salamurai: yes, I am aware that this "forms/script" thing currently is on all the Latin alphabet articles, and I didn't get around removing it from all of them at once. It was added there by somebody a couple of weeks ago, without discussion as far as I can see ([4]). I find it problematic on several levels at once:

1. First, technically. As far as I'm aware '<font face="script">' (or 'style="font-family:script;""') is not a standardized, commonly understood generic font type, such as "serif" or "sans-serif". Maybe a user has a font called "script" installed; maybe some browsers on some systems can pick out some system-specific font for that description, but it's not standardized and it can't be expected to work on all systems. The thing is not that I "need to update my fonts" as you so kindly put it (I can assure you I have a pretty large collection of fonts on my machine); the thing is that Wikipedia ought not to rely on assumptions about users' systems that are not based on clearly defined standards.
2. Second, even if this descriptor could be relied upon to successfully select some "script" font, how predictably similar would they be? Can you be sure the reader is really going to see the kind of glyph you were thinking of? If you want to show the reader a specific type of glyph stylization of a letter, the only safe bet is still to show them an image of it.
3. Third, content-wise: why this particular emphasis on "script" glyphs? (Whatever they are supposed to be.) Why not the blackletter glyphs? The italic? The Caroline minuscule? The Roman uncial? The Kurrent? The Insular?
4. Fourth, presentation: what is "forms/script" even supposed to mean? What is that strange slash doing there? Is the first pair of symbols following supposed to be the "forms", and the second pair the "script"? What kind of logical contrast is that? And why are the "script" forms also printed in double <big>?

As for the other thing that got caught up in the same edit, the alleged plural form "aes", did you actually look up the OED reference? The OED gives this spelling as one out of three ("The plural has been written aes , A's , As."), and then has a whopping single example where it actually occurred (somewhere in Tennyson). This is an extremely marginal form, for all I can see, certainly a lot less common than, for instance, "a's". I'm sure I've never come across it. Has anybody else? Having this oddity mentioned in the lead sentence strikes me as a rather crass form of undue weight.

The plurals are not easy to find, because people confuse the letter with its name. These are the plurals of the names. The others are plurals of the letter. The plural of hundred isn't "100's", it's "hundreds". The plural of gamma isn't "γ's", it's "gammas". Etc. The plural forms of the letters aren't very common, but they do exist, especially in initialisms like "emcees" and "deejays", but also where objects are named after letters, like ems, els, wyes, etc, or sounds are so named, as in dropping your aitches. Should we include the plurals of some letter names but not of others, based on some arbitrary cut-off of how common they are? — kwami (talk) 04:44, 21 February 2013 (UTC)

(Late response:) I must confess I am puzzled by this alleged distinction between a "plural of a letter" and a "plural of its name", and I have "fact"-tagged the relevant footnote accordingly. The OED, which is ostensibly cited at that point, certainly isn't making such a distinction, and I must say I have no idea what the distinction should be in the first place. Could you please provide a definition and some real-life examples what kinds of usage you would consider to constitute a "plural of the name" as opposed to a "plural of the letter" itself? Also, if such a distinction can be semantically maintained (which I doubt), is there any evidence that real-life orthographic practice actually distinguishes between them? I'd be quite surprised if it did, given its esoteric nature. About the examples you offered above, "drop one's aitches" is used alternatingly with "drop one's H's", so I fail to see such a systematic distinction. "Deejays" is not a plural of a letter name, but a plural of a simple noun that happens to be a lexicalized spelling out of an initialism; such cases are very much individually lexicalized and hardly a productive property of the individual letter names as such. Can you provide any concrete examples involving things like "aes" and "ees"? Fut.Perf. ☼ 15:18, 26 May 2013 (UTC)

The OED also has "a per se aes" as the plural of "a per se a" (the letter 'a' standing by itself as the word 'a').

You'll see two conventions for writing letters: A's, b's, c's, etc, and aes, bees, cees, etc. (Both series are often capitalized.) These are analogous to 1's, 2's, 3's, etc. and ones, twos, threes, etc. That is, the plural of "Y" is "Y's", but the plural of "wye" is "wyes". Turner (1840) A New English Grammar and later grammars spell out some of this out, but it's not often covered. — kwami (talk) 19:25, 28 May 2013 (UTC)

Latin and Greek sound

"(...) as in father, its original, Latin and Greek," - I would say it depends on which dialect of English we are talking about. Both /æ/ and /ɑː/ have variety of phonetic realisations - which should perhaps be mentioned.1700-talet (talk) 18:58, 27 February 2014 (UTC)

A as a prefix to mean 'neutral' or similar

I was wondering if someone can add something for a as a prefix in the sense of apolitical, asexual, etc? I do not actually know exactly what it means (eg: is it neutral or otherwise) and came here to find out. I'm not sure of the origin either and this seems to be the article to find out about it. Actually I think it means non. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 37.58.24.158 (talk) 16:00, 19 March 2014 (UTC)

Head over to This article here, which is Wiktionary as Wikipedia is not a dictionary, but thanks for asking. speednat (talk) 23:52, 19 March 2014 (UTC)

Musical Note

I think the musical note is important enough to at least be mentioned under "Other uses". I just don't have the power to add it in. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.91.155.190 (talk) 21:54, 30 July 2014 (UTC)

It is covered in A (disambiguation), which is linked both from the top of the article and from the "Other uses" section. --David Biddulph (talk) 12:48, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Unicode halfwidth and fullwidth

Presently the article table lists only one Unicode representation each of the letters 'a' and 'A'. Actually, in Unicode there is more than one representation of lower-case 'a', and likewise more than one representation of upper-case 'A'. There are for example the Halfwidth and fullwidth forms from CJK languages.

• U+FF21 A vs U+0041 A
• U+FF41 ａ vs U+0061 a

Compare:

• the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
• ｔｈｅ ｑｕｉｃｋ ｂｒｏｗｎ ｆｏｘ ｊｕｍｐｓ ｏｖｅｒ ｔｈｅ ｌａｚｙ ｄｏｇ

See also Latin script in Unicode.

There is of course also the Greek upper-case Α (U+0391), however this is typically regarded as a distinct letter despite looking identical to A.

--Nanite (talk) 14:12, 14 July 2016 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 07 July 2017

"In one study, on average, about 3.68% of letters used in English texts tend to be ⟨a⟩, while the number is 6.22% in Spanish and 3.95% in French.[8]" That is not what the linked table says at all. The linked table gives the frequency of a letter in a sample of words, not the number of times a letter arises overall. You can't just take the percentages (which are not actually percentages) given and divide them by 10 as was done here. Frankly, I would not consider the quoted source to be reliable, as it is a chart that has no source or explanation of how the data was derived. Even though the chart is labeled "Percentages of Letter Frequencies per 1000 Words" The numbers given are not percentages, they are letter frequencies per 100 words (yes 100, not 1000 as titled in the source. I assume the 1000 refers to the sample size used to come up with these numbers, but again the source has no explanation of methodology). i.e. it says that, on average, in a sample of 100 words the letter A will appear 36.8 times. (Note that this does not mean 36.8% of words contain the letter A, as some words will contain a letter multiple times and each instance of the letter is counted here.) If the source is considered appropriate then at the very least the sentence in question should be rewritten to accurately reflect what the source says. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 172.103.193.93 (talk) 00:46, 7 July 2017 (UTC)

Can't find out what is what

In the history heading's table, the last two rows don't make any sense (Mohamed Naufan (talk) 07:28, 10 December 2017 (UTC))

aes

‘aes’ is the plural of the name of the letter. For that statement to be possible, the letter should be written "ae". --Backinstadiums (talk) 20:27, 31 March 2019 (UTC)

I think you should name it "Complaint" — Preceding unsigned comment added by 218.102.123.71 (talk) 06:28, 1 February 2021 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 4 February 2021

Please change the line in the infobox to not include |typedesc=ic and [[Logographic]]. I don't think there is any logographic use of the letter A, nor is it being descended from a logograph reason enough to deem it such. Barfyman (talk) 11:09, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

 Done 54nd60x (talk) 13:28, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

"First letter of the alphabet" listed at Redirects for discussion

An editor has identified a potential problem with the redirect First letter of the alphabet and has thus listed it for discussion. This discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2022 January 4#First letter of the alphabet until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 21:24, 4 January 2022 (UTC)