The letter A probably started as a pictogram of an ox head in Egyptian hieroglyphs or the Proto-semitic alphabet.

By 1600 BC, the Phoenician alphabet's letter had a linear form that served as the basis for all 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 /ɑ/, and changed its name to alpha. In the earliest Greek inscriptions, 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 what was Italy 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.

On 2005-10-14 07:42, Placebo wrote:
Q is the 17th letter of the Latin alphabet.

The Semitic sound value of Qôp (perhaps originally qaw cord) was /q/ (voiceless uvular plosive). In Greek this sign as Qoppa Ϙ probably came to represent several labialized velar plosives, among them /kʷ/ and /kʷʰ/. These sounds changed to /p/ and /pʰ/ respectively. Therefore, Qoppa was transformed into two letters: Qoppa, which stood for a number only, and Phi Φ which stood for the aspirated sound /pʰ/ that came to be pronounced /f/ in Modern Greek. The Etruscans used Q only in conjunction with V, symbolizing thus a /kʷ/. Some scholars claim that Q and Phi are unrelated.