A

The earliest known ancestor of A is aleph—the first letter of the Phoenician alphabet—where it represented a glottal stop , as Phoenician only used consonantal letters. In turn, the ancestor of aleph may have been a pictogram of an ox head in proto-Sinaitic script influenced by Egyptian hieroglyphs, styled as a triangular head with two horns extended. When the ancient Greeks adopted the alphabet, they had no use for a letter representing a glottal stop—so they adapted the sign to represent the vowel , calling the letter by the similar name alpha. In the earliest Greek inscriptions dating to the 8th century BC following the Greek Dark Ages, the letter rests upon its side. However, in the…