Talk:A
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Unicode halfwidth and fullwidth[edit]
Presently the article table lists only one Unicode representation each of the letters 'a' and 'A'. Actually, in Unicode there is more than one representation of lower-case 'a', and likewise more than one representation of upper-case 'A'. There are for example the Halfwidth and fullwidth forms from CJK languages.
- U+FF21 A vs U+0041 A
- U+FF41 a vs U+0061 a
Compare:
- the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
- the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
See also Latin script in Unicode.
There is of course also the Greek upper-case Α (U+0391), however this is typically regarded as a distinct letter despite looking identical to A.
--Nanite (talk) 14:12, 14 July 2016 (UTC)
Semi-protected edit request on 07 July 2017[edit]
"In one study, on average, about 3.68% of letters used in English texts tend to be ⟨a⟩, while the number is 6.22% in Spanish and 3.95% in French.[8]" That is not what the linked table says at all. The linked table gives the frequency of a letter in a sample of words, not the number of times a letter arises overall. You can't just take the percentages (which are not actually percentages) given and divide them by 10 as was done here. Frankly, I would not consider the quoted source to be reliable, as it is a chart that has no source or explanation of how the data was derived. Even though the chart is labeled "Percentages of Letter Frequencies per 1000 Words" The numbers given are not percentages, they are letter frequencies per 100 words (yes 100, not 1000 as titled in the source. I assume the 1000 refers to the sample size used to come up with these numbers, but again the source has no explanation of methodology). i.e. it says that, on average, in a sample of 100 words the letter A will appear 36.8 times. (Note that this does not mean 36.8% of words contain the letter A, as some words will contain a letter multiple times and each instance of the letter is counted here.) If the source is considered appropriate then at the very least the sentence in question should be rewritten to accurately reflect what the source says. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 172.103.193.93 (talk) 00:46, 7 July 2017 (UTC)
Can't find out what is what[edit]
In the history heading's table, the last two rows don't make any sense (Mohamed Naufan (talk) 07:28, 10 December 2017 (UTC))
aes[edit]
‘aes’ is the plural of the name of the letter. For that statement to be possible, the letter should be written "ae". --Backinstadiums (talk) 20:27, 31 March 2019 (UTC)
I think you should name it "Complaint" — Preceding unsigned comment added by 218.102.123.71 (talk) 06:28, 1 February 2021 (UTC)
Semi-protected edit request on 4 February 2021[edit]
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Please change the line in the infobox to not include |typedesc=ic and [[Logographic]]. I don't think there is any logographic use of the letter A, nor is it being descended from a logograph reason enough to deem it such. Barfyman (talk) 11:09, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
"First letter of the alphabet" listed at Redirects for discussion[edit]
An editor has identified a potential problem with the redirect First letter of the alphabet and has thus listed it for discussion. This discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2022 January 4#First letter of the alphabet until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion. -- Tamzin[cetacean needed] (she/they) 21:24, 4 January 2022 (UTC)
Removal of the gifs and See below[edit]
@Future Perfect at Sunrise: Why were the gifs removed? I thought they were fine and were a nice addition to the pages. Saying they were ugly feels really unfair and bias. LeGoldenBoots (talk) 14:49, 19 May 2023 (UTC)
- IMO, they should be included in the article. The GIF provides useful information on how the strokes in the letter 'a' are formed. It also provides cursive variants of the letter 'a' and is a handy snippet of information. I think this change needs consensus before re-adding. Carpimaps (talk) 15:31, 19 May 2023 (UTC)
- First, animated gifs are almost always problematic – they are visually distracting, and they are useless in non-online presentation forms of articles (e.g. print spin-offs etc). For this particular set, they just give undue weight to one particular form of each letter that is actually quite marginal. These are not "the" cursive form; they represent one cursive form that has been used in one particular tradition of school-teaching in one single country in the world for a few decades (the "D'Nealian" method, used in US schools). Why pick out this one form of the letters and give it pride of place in the infoboxes? Why not other forms that were actually far more impactful historically – what about the uncial? the Carolingian minuscule? The Fraktur? the Italic? the Kurrent? There are dozens upon dozens of characteristic styles of handwriting for each letter. Why pick out this particular model that's relevant for nobody except American school children? And then include it without even an informative caption telling the reader what it is?
- I have no objection to re-adding them somewhere further down in the article, if they can be contextualized there through comparison with other representative styles, but really this should just be handled on the page where it belongs, at D'Nealian. Fut.Perf. ☼ 16:04, 19 May 2023 (UTC)
- After seeing the article with and without the animated cursive letter, the article is better without. The animation can be included further down, but not in the infobox. The animation implies that this is the "correct" way to draw a cursive letter. We have no business being so prescriptive, and we have a policy on this: WP:NOTHOWTO. ~Anachronist (talk) 16:47, 19 May 2023 (UTC)
- I agree. It should be placed somewhere else other than the infobox and indicated that it is the D'Nealian method more clearly than it was before. Deletion is way too harsh. LeGoldenBoots (talk) 02:23, 22 May 2023 (UTC)
- After seeing the rationale, I agree that it should be placed later in the article. However, I still am opposed to outright deletion though. Carpimaps (talk) 00:18, 20 May 2023 (UTC)
- 2 27.68.212.69 (talk) 00:08, 7 September 2023 (UTC)
- After seeing the article with and without the animated cursive letter, the article is better without. The animation can be included further down, but not in the infobox. The animation implies that this is the "correct" way to draw a cursive letter. We have no business being so prescriptive, and we have a policy on this: WP:NOTHOWTO. ~Anachronist (talk) 16:47, 19 May 2023 (UTC)
Somebody fix the glyph[edit]
In A#Typographic variants, the image of "Modern italic A" is truncated, cutting off the right half of the lowercase 'a'. ~Anachronist (talk) 01:13, 7 September 2023 (UTC)
- Looks ok to me? I have added a thumbnail here, are you seeing the same issue? --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 11:07, 7 September 2023 (UTC)
- Curious. Where it is resized, I see an entire single-storey a; otherwise I see the first half of a two-storey a. Perhaps the svg's specification of a font is flawed. —Tamfang (talk) 04:31, 24 September 2023 (UTC)
Here is the table again, except that I've moved the italic As to the left.
Blackletter A |
Uncial A |
Another Blackletter A |
Modern Italic A |
Modern Roman A |
Modern script A |
Is the Roman a affected instead?--𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 13:18, 8 December 2023 (UTC)
- I see the italic A exactly the same, all the other ones are fine. Aoscf77 (talk) 13:26, 8 December 2023 (UTC)
- Looks like the File:Modern Italic A.svg just contains a text span with a string of "Aa" and font setting of "Times New Roman", which isn't a supported free font available to the MediaWiki renderer. This should be replaced with a graphical path. Fut.Perf. ☼ 15:38, 8 December 2023 (UTC)
Semi-protected edit request on 8 December 2023[edit]
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154.121.107.69 (talk) 13:49, 8 December 2023 (UTC)
- Not done: it's not clear what changes you want to be made. Please mention the specific changes in a "change X to Y" format and provide a reliable source if appropriate. Liu1126 (talk) 15:16, 8 December 2023 (UTC)
Change[edit]
You could add “a use in kids literacy is A is for apple” or something similar Notsayingmyname (talk) 02:33, 10 December 2023 (UTC)
Edit request[edit]
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Please change the word vowel to vowel letter in the lead sentence to maintain the consistency. 2001:EE0:4BC7:E310:B50C:773B:1A40:16BA (talk) 10:52, 3 February 2024 (UTC)
- Done GrayStormTalk Contributions 20:47, 3 February 2024 (UTC)
Proposed deletion of section in this and all the alphabet[edit]
The article has a section (#Computing) that contains this table:
Preview | A | a | ɑ | |||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Unicode name | LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A | LATIN SMALL LETTER A | LATIN SMALL LETTER ALPHA | |||
Encodings | decimal | hex | dec | hex | dec | hex |
Unicode | 65 | U+0041 | 97 | U+0061 | 593 | U+0251 |
UTF-8 | 65 | 41 | 97 | 61 | 201 145 | C9 91 |
Numeric character reference | A |
A |
a |
a |
ɑ |
ɑ |
EBCDIC family | 193 | C1 | 129 | 81 | ||
ASCII 1 | 65 | 41 | 97 | 61 |
- 1 Also for encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Macintosh families of encodings.
IMO, this is pedantic clutter in any case but specifically:
- Tables are difficult for visitors using screen readers
- The information is mathematically trivial: if anyone really needs to convert hex to decimal, there are many apps that will do it.
- The first 127 codepoints of ASCII and Unicode are identical, as is well known and is readily available from either article.
- The UTF-8 line is a WP:NOTMANUAL, WP:CFORK and WP:UNDUE violation. Anybody who wanted that info would start with the UTF-8 article
- The "numeric character reference" line is even more trivial (and useless: would anybody put that in a html page unless they were obfuscating?
- EBCDIC line is another WP:NOTMANUAL, WP:CFORK and even more WP:UNDUE violation. Anybody who wanted that info would start with the EBCDIC article
- It is off-topic and UNDUE to get bogged down in the details of specific operating systems, let alone their codepages or equivalent legacy overhangs.
Conversely, the section has no reference to á, à, â, ã, ä, å etc etc
So, unless there is a consensus to keep it, I propose to replace it with:
- U+0041 A LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A
- U+0061 a LATIN SMALL LETTER A
- U+0251 ɑ LATIN SMALL LETTER ALPHA
I guess it is the subject of another proposal, but we should consider at least recognising that that most languages that use the Latin alphabet use diacritics with the letter ⟨A⟩ and ⟨a⟩. Comments? --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 21:04, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
- I agree; I've always found these tables quite cumbersome. I believe part of the problem with them is that they were initially designed to display just the uppercase and lowercase forms of the main topic letter itself, e.g. "A" and "a", so they'd only have two columns, but then somebody started to add entries for all sorts of derived letters and variants to them, ending up with tables that had a lot more columns than they had rows, which was always awkward and difficult to read. I also agree most of the information is either trivial or distracting or both. Fut.Perf. ☼ 21:31, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
- Agree with the decluttering—if we're really needing some additional information, we can add it back with avoiding clutter in mind. Remsense诉 09:21, 25 March 2024 (UTC)