THE LETTER A. This letter has stood at the head of the alphabet during the whole of the period that it can be traced historically. The name of the letter in the Phoenician period resembled the Hebrew name aleph and was taken over by the Greeks in the form of alpha. In the Phoenician bet the letter stood for a species of breathing or inherent sound, since vowels were not represented in the Semitic alphabets. The view that the Greeks received their alphabet directly from the Phoenicians has now been largely abandoned. The character may therefore have stood for a vowel in the alphabet before the Greeks took it over. It must indeed almost certainly have done so if it was in use among the peoples of Asia Minor previous to its use by the Greeks. Throughout its history variations have occurred in the form of the latter. The Phoenician form was T . In the Lydian alphabet of the fifth century B.c. it appeared as 4 , in the Carian alphabet A or . In the early Greek alphabet from the island of Thera, which may possibly be dated as far back as the eighth or ninth century B.C., its form was A or A • In the Greek alphabet of classical times its form was usually . Early Italian and Latin forms are A . As early as the middle of the second century A.D. we find A as a form of A, and this is the ancestor of our present minuscule printed a by way of uncial A (fourth century) and , (eighth century), uncial writing being the name given to the round hand which in late Roman times superseded the square capitals that had been suitable for inscription in stone. Under the influence of the uncial hand this form was adopted into Car olingian minuscules. Our rounded minuscule a derives from Latin cursive, in which in the fifth century A.D. appears the astonishing form. This is a hastily-written majuscule A, distorted by its apex having fallen to the left. In the sixth century the cursive form was and from this in the seventh century develops the form from which the rounded form of the Irish and early English hands grew. The rounded capital a that sometimes appears in handwriting is the minuscule letter written large.
The sound for which the letter consistently stood in Greek and .Latin, and doubtless, generally speaking, in its immediate pre Greek history, was the open low back vowel, usually known in modern English as continental a. There are of course countless slight variations in the method of pronouncing this sound. In English the sound has undergone far-reaching changes during and since the Middle English period. These are due to fronting, that is to say, pronouncing the sound more towards the front of the mouth, or to rounding, slightly rounding the lips, which has the effect of causing the sound to be pronounced higher in the mouth. At the present time the letter represents six principal vowel sounds : its original value, the low back vowel, as in father; (2) an intermediate vowel, as in man; (3) a closer vowel, further fronted, as in hare, occurring only before the liquid r; (4) a diphthong (ei) as in take, spade. This is the sound that the letter now normally represents when the vowel is long. (3) represents a stage in the development of the sound on its way from (I) to (4) which was arrested at this point when the vowel was followed by r. A similar fronting of this sound took place in the Ionic Attic dialects of Greek, where sounds derived from the a-sound and represented in other dialects by a are represented by The two remaining developments of the sound are due to round ing: (5) the vowel of water and (6) the vowel of was. This development is due to the influence of the preceding bilabial spirant w. (B. F. C. A.) In Music, A is the name of the first note of the musical alpha bet and constitutes the 6th degree of the scale of C. In respect of pitch A=435.4 vibrations per second, this being the standard pitch or diapason normal. A is the note always given to orchestral players, usually by the oboe, for tuning purposes. (See PiTcH.) Al AT LLOYD'S, a popular expression denoting super-ex cellence, derived from the prestige of the world's chief shipping registry, Lloyd's Register of British and Foreign Shipping. In fact, the highest classification assigned to iron and steel ships is "Ioo Ai." In this symbol, "1 oo A" denotes the condition of the hull, while the "1" denotes efficiency of equipment. "A 1" is almost obsolete, being the symbol of the highest classification of wooden vessels.
(See LLOYD'S REGISTER OF BRITISH AND FOREIGN SHIPPING.) AA, the name of many small European rivers. The word is derived from the 0. G. aha, cognate to the Latin aqua, water (cf. Ger. -ach; Scand. d, aa, pronounced 5). Among the streams of this name are :—Two rivers in west Russia, falling into the Gulf of Riga with Riga lying between their mouths; a river in northern France flowing through St. Omer and Gravelines, and a river of Switzerland, in the cantons of Lucerne and Aargau, which carries the waters of Lakes Baldegger and Hallwiler into the Aar. In Germany there are the Westphalian Aa, joining the Werre at Herford, the Miinster Aa, a tributary of the Ems, and others.