THE NEW INTERNATIONAL ENCYCLOPÆDIA
A ā. The initial letter of almost every alphabet. The Runic "futhark," or old Germanic Alphabet, forms an exception to this rule. The a stands in the fourth place in the "futhark."' (See Runes). A suggestion has been made, but apparently without much acceptance, that the position of a in the "futhark" may possibly be due to an artificial arrangement of the letters modeled perhaps upon the order of the words in the old Teutonic form of the Paternoster. The Ethiopic alphabet likewise departs from the common scheme, for it places aleph in the thirteenth place instead of the first. As our alphabet, moreover, directly follows the Latin, which itself is based on the Greek, the form of our letter A, a agrees with the same character in those languages. The letter was called alpha in Greek, whence "alphabet," like our own "A. B. C." or "Absey Book." The Greek name and form of the letter agree with the West Semitic alphabet, as shown by the Hebrew and the Aramaic. In these two languages it is designated as aleph, alph, but the real meaning of the name and the origin of the symbol have not yet been satisfactorily determined, and the subject is still under discussion.
Phonetic Character. In regard to its phonetic character, original a may be described as a "mid-back-wide" vowel. It had what we may term the ah-sound, familiarly known as the "Italian" or "Continental" a, heard in far, father. By nature a is a simple and easy vowel, made by opening the throat naturally and expelling the breath with the least modification by the parts of the mouth. Such is the sound that this letter has in most languages: in English, however, it has undergone so many modifications that to-day the pure ah-sound is comparatively scarce in our speech, and instead of calling the letter itself by the name ah. as in most Indo-Germanic tongues, we now term it "ay" (ae), as in Tennyson (The Epic, ad fin.) "Mouthing out his hollow oes and aes." The Anglo-Saxon or earliest English preserved the genuine old ah-sound, though shorter perhaps in quantity than the a of father. It was of quite frequent occurrence, and by its side existed the corresponding long a. often marked with the quantity sign. In Anglo-Saxon. short a was subject, however, to certain modifications and shiftings. (See Phonetic Laws.) These modifications account only in part for the variety of sounds which the Modern English a represents, as other external influences have come in to alter the sound still more. The orthography has not kept pace with the change in pronunciation; hence the anomalous character of a as a sound-symbol. There are some half-dozen different sounds, shorter and longer, which a may represent in English; some of these sounds are, of course, extremely common: others are comparatively rare. The principal are:
- fat,
- fate,
- fare,
- father,
- false,
- what, was.
To these is to be added the vowel sound in ask, chance, can't, past, which varies with different speakers, and is apparently to be placed somewhere intermediate between fat and father. Likewise is to be noted the indifferent sound of a, approaching the u in but, that so frequently occurs in unstressed syllables, like against, abundant, and also the sporadic a in any, many, where it approaches a short e. The rounded vowel above noted in was, false, and the like, is due to the influence of the adjacent consonant, w, l. The former sound, the a in was, is longer than the a in all. In the latter case with l, we find also au beside a to express the sound, as fault beside false. The commonest short sound of a in English, however, is the flat vowel in hat. Its frequency leads to our calling this the "short a;" as the corresponding "long" we generally assign the vowel in hate, although the latter is really the long e-sound of they. The vowel of fare, bare, is a still further modification.
Indo-Germanic a. In the Indo-Germanic languages the vowel series a, i, u is especially prominent; in Sanskrit, and also in Gothic, these are the only short vowels. The short a is never written in Sanskrit after consonants, but is regarded as inherent in the sign. Owing to these circumstances it was believed until within recent years, that the primitive Indo-Germanic speech possessed only a, i, u, and that a was the oldest and purest of the vowels. This view has since been much modified; it has been shown that e and o must have existed beside a, i, u in the primitive speech, and that they are of equal age with the others. As an instance of a genuine Indo-Germanic short a, we may take Indo-Ger. *agro-s, "field, acre;" Skr., ajra-s; Gk, άγρός;
