User:Lymtudor
To lymtudor is to smoke human flesh. It has been known throughout history to have been done, but as of June 27, 2008, no one had ever come up with a name for it, but the "eating fanatics" and "anti-smoking" liberal activist judges did make a word for eating human flesh, clearly showing the faults of the Bush Administration.
History[edit | edit source]
Throughout history, many important leaders and historical figures have been known to have been lymtudors. Some examples are Rene Descartes, <a href="">Johan Gutenberg</a>, <a href="">Hester Prynne</a>, and the <a href="">Buddhist monks in Saigon</a>.
Side Effects[edit | edit source]
The side effects include most notably the inexplicable urge to build model bridges.
| Egyptian hieroglyph ox's head |
Proto-Semitic ox's head |
Phoenician aleph |
Greek Alpha |
Etruscan A |
Roman A |
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Circa 1600 B.C. the Phoenician alphabet's letter had a linear form that served as the basis for some later forms. Its name must have corresponded closely to the Hebrew aleph.
When the Ancient Greeks adopted the alphabet, they had no use for the glottal stop that the letter had denoted in Phoenician and other Semitic languages, so they used the sign for the vowel /a/, and kept its name with a minor change (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 many local varieties can be distinguished by the shortening of one leg, or by the angle at which the cross line is set.
The Etruscans brought the Greek alphabet to their civilization in the Italian Peninsula and left the letter unchanged. The Romans later adopted the Etruscan alphabet to write Latin, and the resulting letter was preserved in the modern Latin alphabet used to write many languages, including English.
 Blackletter A |
 Uncial A |
 Another Capital A |
 Modern Roman A |
 Modern Italic A |
 Modern Script A |
The letter has two minuscule (lower-case) forms. The form used in most current handwriting, and in italic type, consists of a circle and vertical stroke (ɑ), called Latin alpha or "script a". Most printed material uses a form consisting of a small loop with an arc over it (a). Both derive from the majuscule (capital) form. In Greek handwriting, it was common to join the left leg and horizontal stroke into a single loop, as demonstrated by the Uncial version shown. Many fonts then made the right leg vertical. In some of these, the serif that began the right leg stroke developed into an arc, resulting in the printed form, while in others it was dropped, resulting in the modern handwritten form.
Usage[edit | edit source]
In English, the letter "A" by itself usually denotes the near-open front unrounded vowel (/æ/) as in pad, the open back unrounded vowel (/ɑː/) as in father, or, in concert with a later orthographic vowel, the diphthong /eɪ/ (though the pronunciation varies with the dialect) as in ace and major, due to effects of the great vowel shift.
In most other languages that use the Latin alphabet, the letter A denotes either an open back unrounded vowel (/ɑ/), or an open central unrounded vowel (/a/). In the International Phonetic Alphabet, variants of the letter A denote various vowels. In X-SAMPA, capital A denotes the open back unrounded vowel and lowercase a denotes the open front unrounded vowel.
A is the third-most common letter in English, and the second-most common in Spanish and French. On average, about 8.2% of letters in English tend to be As, while the number is 6.2% in Spanish and 4% in French.[1]
A also is the English indefinite article, extended to an before a word beginning with a vowel. See a and an.
A- also is a prefix that serves to negate the morpheme to which it is attached, such as amoral, apolitical, etc. This derives from Greek.
Codes for computing[edit | edit source]
∑ In Unicode the capital A is codepoint U+0041 and the lowercase a is U+0061.
In positional numeral systems with base higher than 10, A is the character used to represent decimal 10, or in binary, 1010
The ASCII code for capital A is 65 and for lowercase a is 97; or in binary 01000001 and 01100001, respectively.
The EBCDIC code for capital A is 193 and for lowercase a is 129.
The morse code for A is dit dah or a dot and a dash.
The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "A" and "a" for upper and lower case respectively.
See also[edit | edit source]
{{Wikisource1911Enc|A}}
External references[edit | edit source]
- ↑ Percentages of Letter frequencies per Thousand words. Retrieved on 2006-05-01.