• ‘A’ STARTS ITS life in around 1800 BCE. Turn our modern ‘A’ upside down and you can see something of its original shape. Can you see an ox’s head with its horns sticking up in the air? If so, you can see the remains of this letter’s original name, ‘ox’, or ‘aleph’ in the ancient Semitic languages. By the time the Phoenicians are using it in around 1000 BCE it is lying on its side and looks more like a ‘K’. Speed-writing seems to have taken the diagonals through the upright, making it more like a horizontal form of our modern ‘A’ with the point on the left-hand side. The ancient Greeks called it ‘alpha’ and reversed it, with the point on the right-hand side, probably because, eventually, they decided to write from left to right. Between around 750 BCE and 500 BCE the Greeks rotated it to what we would think of as its upright position. The Romans added the serifs which you can see on inscriptions like Trajan’s Column in Rome.

Writing the lower-case ‘A’ by hand seems to have produced first an upside-down ‘v’ shape, which slowly acquired a connecting loop making it resemble the ‘two-storey’ ‘a’ you’re looking at now. This belongs to the standardized script known as ‘Carolingian minuscule’ which Charlemagne’s scribes created.

The ‘single-storey’, lower-case ‘a’ that persists in children’s reading books and a good deal of advertising began its life with Irish scribes.

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER-NAME

The people who preceded the Romans on the Italian peninsula, the Etruscans, were probably the first people to give the name of the letter a monosyllabic sound: ‘ah’, derived from the Greek word ‘alpha’. The Romans followed suit and gave that name to the Romance languages of Europe. Surely, then, with the arrival of the Norman French, we anglophones should be calling it ‘ah’ as well? However, between the Normans and us lies the ‘Great Vowel Shift’, a phenomenon that caused people between 1400 and 1600 to change their ‘ahs’ to ‘ays’. (In case you think this is beyond belief and some hokum invented by linguists, you should talk to New Zealanders who are, even as I write, in the throes of turning their ‘pins’ to ‘pens’ and their ‘pens’ to ‘pins’. Shifting our vowels is something that groups of us like doing sometimes.)

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER

In English, ‘a’ – either as a single letter in the middle of a single-syllable word, as the initial letter of a word, or in conjunction with other vowel-letters, ‘y’, ‘w’, ‘r’ and ‘h’ – can indicate a wide range of sounds: ‘cat’, ‘was’, ‘all’, ‘and’, ‘late’, ‘father’, ‘hail’, ‘haul’, ‘Michael’, ‘ray’, ‘threat’, ‘beat’, ‘boat’, ‘dial’, ‘ah’, ‘raw’, ‘cart’ and so on.

On rare occasions we can write ‘aa’ as in the names ‘Aaron’ and ‘Saab’.

‘A’ and its partner ‘an’ does service as our ‘indefinite article’. In many cases, this indicates that we are not referring to something that I the speaker or you the listener have referred to just before. ‘I was at a football match’, ‘I was eating an apple’. The plural of ‘a’ is no article at all or ‘some’, ‘both’ or a number. ‘I was eating apples.’ However, we do say things like, ‘That was a day to remember,’ where the total construction indicates we are ‘referring back’ to something that we all know about.

(The ‘definite article’, ‘the’, is usually for when you want to indicate that you, the listener, or the world beyond has been talking, writing or referring to the thing spoken about before. ‘I was eating the apple,’ i.e. the one you mentioned.)

The history of ‘an’ is a peculiar one. It seems as if there was once a sufficient number of words like ‘nuncle’ (‘uncle’) for the ‘n’ to migrate across from the ‘a’. King Lear’s Fool calls him ‘nuncle’.

‘Ah!’ is a very useful sound. It can mean many things depending on the notes you hit as you say it. You can indicate that you’re surprised, that you knew it all along, that you’re satisfied, that you’ve been hurt, that you’re sympathetic, or you’re pretending you’re sympathetic, that you’ve caught someone out and so on. It can be linked to ‘ha’ as in ‘Ah-ha’ or to four ‘hahs’ if you’re the BeeGees.