A as a Graphic Form

The previous article traces the Latin A's sound and phonetic descent from Phoenician aleph. Its shape has its own separate history. Phoenician aleph was drawn as a stylised ox head, complete with two horns; the Greeks, who had no consonantal glottal stop to write, rotated the pictograph and read it as the vowel alpha, still recognisably horned in early Greek forms.

Etruscan scribes in central Italy adopted this alpha around the 7th century BCE and passed it to Rome largely unchanged in outline, and the capital A cut into Roman monumental inscriptions such as Trajan's Column (113 CE) already has the crossbar and two slanted strokes still used today. The lowercase a has a longer and stranger road: Roman cursive handwriting rounded the two strokes into a loop, producing by the early Middle Ages a two-story form with a small bowl beneath a curled top, the ancestor of the printed a still used in most typefaces. A different, single-story a, closer to the capital in outline, developed in parallel in medieval cursive and became the standard handwritten form; both shapes now coexist, one for print and one for handwriting and some typefaces, an unusual split not shared by most other Latin letters.