Among these were the semicursive minuscule of Italy, the Merovingian script in France, the Visigothic script in Spain, and the Insular or Anglo-Irish semi-uncial or Anglo-Saxon majuscule of Great Britain. Īt the end of the Roman Empire (5th century AD), several variants of the cursive minuscule developed through Western Europe. The known variants include the early semi-uncial, the uncial, and the later semi-uncial. Variants also existed that were intermediate between the monumental and cursive styles. Due to the "perishable" nature of these surfaces, there are not as many examples of this style as there are of the monumental, but there are still many surviving examples of different types of cursive, such as majuscule cursive, minuscule cursive, and semicursive minuscule. There was also a cursive style used for everyday or utilitarian writing, which was done on more perishable surfaces. First was the monumental or lapidary style, which was used when inscribing on stone or other "permanent" media. Typographic variants Different glyphs of the lowercase letter A.ĭuring Roman times, there were many variant forms of the letter "A". The Romans later adopted the Etruscan alphabet to write the Latin language, and the resulting letter was preserved in the Latin alphabet that would come to be used to write many languages, including English. The Etruscans brought the Greek alphabet to their civilization in the Italian Peninsula and left the letter unchanged. In the earliest Greek inscriptions after the Greek Dark Ages, dating to the eighth century BC, the letter rests upon its side, but in the Greek alphabet of later times it generally resembles the modern capital letter, although many local varieties can be distinguished by the shortening of one leg, or by the angle at which the cross line is set. When the ancient Greeks adopted the alphabet, they had no use for a letter to represent the glottal stop-the consonant sound that the letter denoted in Phoenician and other Semitic languages, and that was the first phoneme of the Phoenician pronunciation of the letter-so they used their version of the sign to represent the vowel /a/, and called it by the similar name of alpha. In turn, the ancestor 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. The earliest known certain ancestor of "A" is aleph (also written 'aleph), the first letter of the Phoenician alphabet, which consisted entirely of consonants (for that reason, it is also called an abjad to distinguish it from a true alphabet). In English grammar, " a", and its variant " an", are indefinite articles. The latter is commonly used in handwriting and fonts based on it, especially fonts intended to be read by children, and is also found in italic type. The lowercase version can be written in two forms: the double-storey a and single-storey ɑ. The uppercase version consists of the two slanting sides of a triangle, crossed in the middle by a horizontal bar. It is similar in shape to the Ancient Greek letter Alpha, from which it derives. Its name in English is a (pronounced / ˈ eɪ/), plural aes. A, or a, is the first letter and the first vowel of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide.
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