A letter that has stood at the forefront of the alphabet during the period of historical traceability. The name of the letter in the Phoenician period resembled the Hebrew name aleph meaning “ox”; the shape is believed to be derived from an earlier symbol resembling the head of an ox. The letter was perceived by the Greeks as alpha. In the Phoenician alphabet, the letter stood for a species of breathing, since the voices were not represented in the Semitic alphabets.

The sound that the letter has always stood in Greek and Latin is an open low back vowel, sometimes known in modern English as continental. Of course, there are a lot of minor changes in the way the pronouncing this sound.

In English, the sound has undergone significant changes during and from the middle of the English period. They are associated with the faction, i.e. the expression of sound is more in relation to the front of the mouth or rounding, slightly rounding the lips, which leads to the fact that the sound is expressed higher in the mouth.

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