The earliest certain ancestor of "A" is aleph (also called
'aleph), the first letter of the Phoenician alphabet (which, by
consisting entirely of consonants, is an abjad rather than a
true alphabet). In turn, the origin of aleph may have been a
pictogram of an ox head in proto-Sinaitic script influenced by
Egyptian hieroglyphs, styled as a triangular head with two horns
extended. |Latin 300 AD Another Blackletter A Modern Roman A
Modern Italic A Modern script A When the ancient Greeks adopted
the alphabet, they had no use for the glottal stop—the first
phoneme of the Phoenician pronunciation of the letter, and the
sound that the letter denoted in Phoenician and other Semitic
languages—so they used an adaptation of the sign to represent
the vowel /a/, and gave it the similar name of alpha. In the
earliest Greek inscriptions after the Greek Dark Ages, dating to
the 8th century BC, the letter rests upon its side, but in the
Greek alphabet of later times it generally resembles the modern
capital letter, although