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2023-01-14 23:16 dustin  
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^ is stunned when he looks at this old egypt glyph looking like an ox. so this animal would become the first letter of the alphabet, and also the name of the first cave he ever digged through!  
  
history of the letter "a":  
  
| the egyptian root is most likely a hieroglyph looking like an ox head with two horns (see left half of the cave, although it might look more like a rabbit... ). :d  
  
| the phoenicians simplified this glyph to a kind of "lying a" where the middle line was still longer than today (see right half of the cave). this was the first letter of their alphabet and they called it "aleph" (=ox).   
  
| the greek adapted the letter but rotated it and shortened the middle line, so that their first letter "alpha" already looked like an "a".   
  
| the etruscians and romans adapted the letter without significant changes.  
  
so basically, an "a" is a triangular ox head turned by 180 degrees, standing on its horns! :d  
  
another interesting aspect is that "a" was not always a vowel. As mentioned in the intro, the phoenicians had only letters for consonants, not for vowels. So what consonant did their letter „aleph“ represent? it was the so-called "glottal stop", a short „cracking“ sound which is still used in many languages without an extra letter for it.  
Examples for the glottal stop sound (represented by a dash „-“):  
english: "uh-oh" (i haven't found anything else in english!) :d  
german: "be-achten" (=observe)  
dutch: "be-amen" (=confirm)  
czech: "po-uzivat" (=use)  
finnish: "sade-aamu" (=rainy morning)  
polish: "-era" (=era)  
the greek needed lots of vowels for their language, and they didn't use the glottal stop sound anyway, so they defined their „alpha“ to represent a vowel, which was also taken over by the etruscians and the romans.  
  
cave difficulty: 1/10

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2023-01-15 14:02 nesdori  
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interesting stuff; this will be fun series if the history of other letters is as fascinating as this :)

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2023-01-15 19:38 dustin  
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 nesdori , glad that you share my interest in this! and i definitely had fun with the research of the other letters as well :d

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2023-01-23 21:29 helena  
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 dustin , I might not be able to solve them all, but I am sure going to enjoy reading the stories!

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2023-01-24 21:42 dustin  
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glad to read that  Helena  :d