Archived from the original on 11 June 2022. (Subscription or participating institution membership required.) For Lamprias had said that the first articulate sound made is "alpha", because it is very plain and simple-the air coming off the mouth does not require any motion of the tongue-and therefore this is the first sound that children make.Īccording to Plutarch's natural order of attribution of the vowels to the planets, alpha was connected with the Moon.Ĭonsequently, the term "alpha" has also come to be used to denote "primary" position in social hierarchy, examples being " alpha males" or pack leaders.įor accented Greek characters, see Greek diacritics: Computer encoding. He then added that he would rather be assisted by Lamprias, his own grandfather, than by Dionysus' grandfather, i.e. Ammonius asks Plutarch what he, being a Boeotian, has to say for Cadmus, the Phoenician who reputedly settled in Thebes and introduced the alphabet to Greece, placing alpha first because it is the Phoenician name for ox-which, unlike Hesiod, the Phoenicians considered not the second or third, but the first of all necessities. Plutarch, in Moralia, presents a discussion on why the letter alpha stands first in the alphabet. Was adopted as representing the vowel similarly, hē and ʽayin are Phoenician consonants that became Greek vowels, epsilon and omicron, respectively. The majority of the letters of the Phoenician alphabet were adopted into Greek with much the same sounds as they had had in Phoenician, but ʼāleph, the Phoenician letter representing the glottal stop , The Phoenician alphabet was adopted for Greek in the early 8th century BC, perhaps in Euboea. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, the letter ɑ, which looks similar to the lower-case alpha, represents the open back unrounded vowel.įurther information: History of the Greek alphabet Origin The uppercase letter alpha is not generally used as a symbol because it tends to be rendered identically to the uppercase Latin A. The proportionality operator " ∝" (in Unicode: U+221D) is sometimes mistaken for alpha. In mathematical logic, α is sometimes used as a placeholder for ordinal numbers. In aerodynamics, the letter is used as a symbol for the angle of attack of an aircraft and the word "alpha" is used as a synonym for this property. In ethology, it is used to name the dominant individual in a group of animals. Furthermore, in mathematics, the letter alpha is used to denote the area underneath a normal curve in statistics to denote significance level when proving null and alternative hypotheses. It is also commonly used in mathematics in algebraic solutions representing quantities such as angles. Alpha also stands for thermal expansion coefficient of a compound in physical chemistry. The letter alpha represents various concepts in physics and chemistry, including alpha radiation, angular acceleration, alpha particles, alpha carbon and strength of electromagnetic interaction (as fine-structure constant). It originates from the Proto-Indo-European * n̥- ( syllabic nasal) and is cognate with English un-.Ĭopulative a is the Greek prefix ἁ- code: ell promoted to code: el or ἀ- code: ell promoted to code: el ha-, a- code: ell promoted to code: el. Privative a is the Ancient Greek prefix ἀ- or ἀν- a-, an-, added to words to negate them. Doric, Aeolic, Attic χώρᾱ chṓrā – Ionic χώρη chṓrē, "country".In Doric and Aeolic, long alpha is preserved in all positions. In Attic, the shift did not take place after epsilon, iota, and rho ( ε, ι, ρ e, i, r). In Ionic, the shift took place in all positions. In the Attic– Ionic dialect of Ancient Greek, long alpha fronted to ( eta). It can also combine with the iota subscript ( ᾳ). In the polytonic orthography of Greek, alpha, like other vowel letters, can occur with several diacritic marks: any of three accent symbols ( ά, ὰ, ᾶ), and either of two breathing marks ( ἁ, ἀ), as well as combinations of these. In Modern Greek, vowel length has been lost, and all instances of alpha simply represent the open front unrounded vowel IPA. ὥρα = ὥρᾱ hōrā Greek pronunciation: "a time".Where there is ambiguity, long and short alpha are sometimes written with a macron and breve today: Ᾱᾱ, Ᾰᾰ code: ell promoted to code: el. In Ancient Greek, alpha was pronounced and could be either phonemically long () or short (). Letters that arose from alpha include the Latin letter A and the Cyrillic letter А. Alpha is derived from the Phoenician letter aleph, which is the West Semitic word for " ox". In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of one. Alpha / ˈ æ l f ə/ (uppercase Α, lowercase α Ancient Greek: ἄλφα, álpha, or Greek: άλφα, romanized: álfa) is the first letter of the Greek alphabet.
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