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Alpha (letter)
 
 
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Alpha (uppercase ?, lowercase a; ) is the first letter of the Greek alphabet
Greek alphabet

The Greek alphabet is a set of twenty-four letters that has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th century BC or early 8th century BCE....
. In the system of Greek numerals
Greek numerals

Greek numerals are a numeral system using letters of the Greek alphabet. They are also known by the names Milesian numerals, Alexandrian numerals, or alphabetic numerals....
 it has a value of 1. It was derived from the Phoenician letter
Phoenician alphabet

The Phoenician alphabet is a continuation of the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, by convention taken to originate around 1050 BC. It was used for the writing of Phoenician language, a Northern Semitic languages language, used by the civilization of Phoenicia....
 Aleph
Aleph (letter)

' is the reconstructed name of the first letter of the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, continued in descended Semitic alphabets as Phoenician alphabet ' , Syriac alphabet ' , Hebrew alphabet Aleph , and Arabic alphabet ' ....
 . Letters that arose from Alpha include the Latin A
A

The letter A is the first letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English language is a ; the plural is aes or, more commonly, a's....
 and the Cyrillic letter ?
A (Cyrillic)

A is the first letter of the Cyrillic alphabet.It arose directly from the Greek letter Alpha . In the Early Cyrillic alphabet its name was "???" az and it had a numerical value of 1 ....
.

In both Classical Greek
Ancient Greek

Ancient Greek is the historical stage in the development of the Greek language spanning across the Archaic Greece , Classical Greece , and Hellenistic civilization periods of ancient Greece and the classical antiquity....
 and Modern Greek
Modern Greek

Modern Greek refers the varieties of Greek spoken in the modern era. The beginning of the "modern" period of the language is often symbolically assigned to the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, even though that date marks no clear linguistic boundary and many characteristic modern features of the language had been present centuries earli...
, alpha represents the Open front unrounded vowel
Open front unrounded vowel

The open front unrounded vowel is a type of vowel sound, used in some Speech communication languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is a....
, .

Plutarch
Plutarch

Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus , c. AD 46 ? 120 ? commonly known in English as Plutarch ? was a Ancient Rome historian , biographer, essayist, and Middle Platonism....
 in Moralia
Moralia

The Moralia of the first-century Greek priest Plutarch of Delphi is an eclectic collection of 78 essays and transcribed speeches. They give an insight into Roman and Greek life, but often are also fascinating timeless observations in their own right....
, presents a discussion on why the letter alpha stands first in the alphabet.






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Alpha (uppercase ?, lowercase a; ) is the first letter of the Greek alphabet
Greek alphabet

The Greek alphabet is a set of twenty-four letters that has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th century BC or early 8th century BCE....
. In the system of Greek numerals
Greek numerals

Greek numerals are a numeral system using letters of the Greek alphabet. They are also known by the names Milesian numerals, Alexandrian numerals, or alphabetic numerals....
 it has a value of 1. It was derived from the Phoenician letter
Phoenician alphabet

The Phoenician alphabet is a continuation of the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, by convention taken to originate around 1050 BC. It was used for the writing of Phoenician language, a Northern Semitic languages language, used by the civilization of Phoenicia....
 Aleph
Aleph (letter)

' is the reconstructed name of the first letter of the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, continued in descended Semitic alphabets as Phoenician alphabet ' , Syriac alphabet ' , Hebrew alphabet Aleph , and Arabic alphabet ' ....
 
Phoenician Aleph
. Letters that arose from Alpha include the Latin A
A

The letter A is the first letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English language is a ; the plural is aes or, more commonly, a's....
 and the Cyrillic letter ?
A (Cyrillic)

A is the first letter of the Cyrillic alphabet.It arose directly from the Greek letter Alpha . In the Early Cyrillic alphabet its name was "???" az and it had a numerical value of 1 ....
.

In both Classical Greek
Ancient Greek

Ancient Greek is the historical stage in the development of the Greek language spanning across the Archaic Greece , Classical Greece , and Hellenistic civilization periods of ancient Greece and the classical antiquity....
 and Modern Greek
Modern Greek

Modern Greek refers the varieties of Greek spoken in the modern era. The beginning of the "modern" period of the language is often symbolically assigned to the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, even though that date marks no clear linguistic boundary and many characteristic modern features of the language had been present centuries earli...
, alpha represents the Open front unrounded vowel
Open front unrounded vowel

The open front unrounded vowel is a type of vowel sound, used in some Speech communication languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is a....
, .

Plutarch
Plutarch

Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus , c. AD 46 ? 120 ? commonly known in English as Plutarch ? was a Ancient Rome historian , biographer, essayist, and Middle Platonism....
 in Moralia
Moralia

The Moralia of the first-century Greek priest Plutarch of Delphi is an eclectic collection of 78 essays and transcribed speeches. They give an insight into Roman and Greek life, but often are also fascinating timeless observations in their own right....
, presents a discussion on why the letter alpha stands first in the alphabet. Ammonius asks Plutarch what he, being a Boeotia
Boeotia

Boeotia, Beotia, or B?otia , formerly Cadmeis, was a region of ancient Greece, north of the eastern part of the Gulf of Corinth. It was bounded on the south by Megaris and the Kithairon mountain range that forms a natural barrier with Attica, on the north by Opuntian Locris and the Euripus Strait at the Gulf of Euboea, and on the...
n, thinks of Cadmus
Cadmus

Cadmus or Kadmos , in Greek mythology mythology, was a Phoenician prince, the son of Agenor and the brother of Phoenix , Cilix and Europa ....
, the Phoenicia
Phoenicia

Phoenicia was an ancient civilization centered in the north of ancient Canaan, with its heartland along the coastal regions of modern day Lebanon, extending to parts of Israel, Syria and the Palestinian territories....
n who reputedly settled in Thebes and introduced the alphabet to Greece, placing alpha first because it is the Phoenician name for ox
Ox

Oxen are bovinae trained as draught animals. Often they are adult, castration males. Oxen are used for ploughing, transport, hauling cargo, threshing grain by trampling, powering machines for grinding grain, irrigation or other purposes, and drawing carts and wagons....
 -- which, unlike Hesiod
Hesiod

Hesiod was a Greek language oral poet, his date is uncertain but leading scholars agree that Hesiod lived in the latter half of the Eighth-century BCE....
, the Phoenicians considered not the second or third, but the first of all necessities. "Nothing at all" Plutarch replied. He then added that he would rather be assisted by Lamprias, his own grandfather, than by Dionysus
Dionysus

In classical mythology, Dionysus or Dionysos , is the God of wine, the inspirer of ritual madness and ecstasy, and a major figure of Greek mythology, and one of the twelve Olympians, among whom Greek mythology treated Dionysus as a late arrival....
' grandfather, i.e. Cadmus. 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.

The Homer
Homer

Homer is traditionally held to be the author of the ancient Greek language epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey, as well as of the Homeric Hymns....
ic word "alphesiboios" () is associated with both the root "alph-" and "ox". It is derived from "alphano" meaning to yield, earn and "bous" meaning ox, hence alphesiboios means bringing in or acquiring oxen.

According to Plutarch's natural order of attribution of the vowel
Vowel

In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as English ah! or oh! , pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis....
s to the planet
Planet

A planet , as 2006 definition of planet by the International Astronomical Union , is a celestial body orbiting a star or Stellar evolution#Stellar remnants that is massive enough to be rounded by its own gravity, is not massive enough to cause thermonuclear fusion, and has cleared the neighbourhood of planetesimals....
s, alpha was connected with the Moon
Moon

The Moon is Earth's only natural satellite and the List of natural satellites by diameter satellite in the Solar System. The average centre-to-centre distance from the Earth to the Moon is km, about thirty times the diameter of the Earth....
. Oxen were also associated with the Moon in both early Sumerian
Mesopotamian mythology

Mesopotamian mythology is the collective name given to Sumerian, Akkadian, Assyrian, and Babylonian mythologies from the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Iraq....
 and Egyptian
Ancient Egypt

Ancient Egypt was an Ancient history civilization in eastern North Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile in what is now the modern nation of Egypt....
 religious symbolism, possibly due to the crescent shape of their horns.

Alpha, both as a symbol and term, is used to refer to or describe a variety of things, including the first or most significant occurrence of something. The New Testament has God declaring himself to be the "Alpha and Omega
Alpha and Omega (Christianity)

The term Alpha and Omega comes from the phrase "I am the alpha and the omega" , an appellation of God in the Book of Revelation . Its meaning is found in the fact that alpha and omega are respectively the first and last letters of the Classical Greek alphabet....
, the beginning and the end, the first and the last." (Revelation
Book of Revelation

The Book of Revelation, also called Revelation to John, Apocalypse of John , and Revelation of Jesus Christ is the last Biblical canon of the New Testament in the Christian Bible....
 22:13, KJV, and see also 1:8).

The uppercase letter alpha is not generally used as a symbol because it tends to be rendered identically to the uppercase latin A
A

The letter A is the first letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English language is a ; the plural is aes or, more commonly, a's....
.

Common notational uses

Alpha is used extensively in physics
Physics

Physics is the natural science which examines basic concepts such as energy, force, and spacetime and all that derives from these, such as mass, charge, matter and its Motion ....
 & chemistry
Chemistry

Chemistry is the science concerned with the composition, structure, and properties of matter, as well as the changes it undergoes during chemical reactions....
 to represent many things, such as alpha radiation, alpha particle
Alpha particle

Alpha particles consist of two protons and two neutrons bound together into a particle identical to a helium atomic nucleus; hence, it can be written as He2+ or 42He2+....
s and alpha carbon
Alpha carbon

The alpha carbon in organic chemistry refers to the first carbon that attaches to a functional group . By extension, the second carbon is the beta carbon, and so on....
. Alpha also stands for thermal expansion coefficient of a compound
Compound

Compound may refer to:* Chemical compounds, combinations of two or more elements* Compound , a cluster of buildings having a shared purpose, usually inside a fence or wall...
 in physical chemistry
Physical chemistry

Physical chemistry is the application of physics to macroscopic, microscopic, atomic, subatomic, and particulate phenomena in chemical systems within the field of chemistry traditionally using the principles, practices and concepts of thermodynamics, quantum chemistry, statistical mechanics and kinetics....
. It is also commonly used in mathematics
Mathematics

Mathematics is the study of quantity, structure, space, change, and related topics of pattern and form. Mathematicians seek out patterns whether found in numbers, space, natural science, computers, imaginary abstractions, or elsewhere....
 in algebraic solutions
Algebra

Algebra is a branch of mathematics concerning the study of structure , relation , and quantity. Together with geometry, mathematical analysis, combinatorics, and number theory, algebra is one of the main branches of mathematics....
 representing quantities such as angles.

Linguistic correlates

In the Runic alphabet
Runic alphabet

The runic alphabets are a set of related alphabets using Letter known as runes to write various Germanic languages prior to the adoption of the Latin alphabet and for specialized purposes thereafter....
 of the Elder Futhark
Elder Futhark

The Elder Futhark is the oldest form of the runic alphabet, used by Germanic tribes for Northwest Germanic and Migration period Germanic dialects of the 2nd to 8th centuries for inscriptions on artifacts and runestones....
 in received shamanic oral lore traditions from Scandinavia, the alphabet is a cycle rather than a linear progression and Ur
Ur (rune)

The linguistic reconstruction Proto-Germanic name of the Elder Futhark u runic alphabet is *Uruz meaning "aurochs" or *?ram "water". It may have been derived from the Old Italic alphabet charactrt u as it is similar in both shape and sound value....
 commences the cycle that Fe
Fe (rune)

The Fe rune represents the f-sound in the Younger Futhark and Anglo-Saxon runes alphabets. Its name means " wealth", cognate to English fee with the original meaning of "sheep" or "cattle" ....
 closes, both are cattle
Cattle

Cattle, colloquially referred to as cows, are domestication ungulates, a member of the subfamily Bovinae of the family Bovidae. They are raised as livestock for meat , dairy products , leather and as draft animals ....
, which is a correlate to the Christian Alpha and Omega
Alpha and Omega (Christianity)

The term Alpha and Omega comes from the phrase "I am the alpha and the omega" , an appellation of God in the Book of Revelation . Its meaning is found in the fact that alpha and omega are respectively the first and last letters of the Classical Greek alphabet....
.