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SMBC, Zach Weinersmith, Oct. 3, 2025:
Not to mention what it can do as a letter, a noun, an article, a preposition, a verb, a pronoun, an adverb, a particle, a contraction, a conjunction, a symbol, and an interjection.
Selected readings
"A" — Wikipedia
McCarter, P. Kyle (1974). "The Early Diffusion of the Alphabet". The Biblical Archaeologist. 37 (3): 54–68. JSTOR 3210965. S2CID 126182369
[h.t. Ted McClure]
J.W. Brewer said,
October 4, 2025 @ 9:14 pm
In words of ultimate Latin origin it can mean either toward, as a clipping (in certain phonological contexts) of "ad," or away from, as a clipping of "ab" in ditto. That's versatility. Although I think the phonological contexts suitable for the two clippings tend to be different, so you don't get too confusing a minimal pair.
unekdoud said,
October 5, 2025 @ 12:06 am
Are any of those prefixes pronounced /a/?
David Marjanović said,
October 5, 2025 @ 7:10 am
a a
– Pāṇini
In English? Not that I can think of; I'm pretty sure they're all unstressed.
Philip Taylor said,
October 5, 2025 @ 8:55 am
How about the "a" in a priori (or in a posteriori, for that matter), David ? At least, for those of us who don't pronounce the first syllable /ˌeɪ/.
Bob Ladd said,
October 5, 2025 @ 9:33 am
@ David Marjanović:
There are lots of cases in which the prefixes under discussion are stressed, or at least not reduced. E.g. atheist, amoral, aphonia, amnesia, apposite, appertain, addict, afferent,/I> and, of course, affix! I can't think of any cases where Latin ab- reduces to a- while retaining a full vowel, though.
Chas Belov said,
October 5, 2025 @ 2:25 pm
@Bob Ladd:
Although despite being stressed, some would be pronounced differently. Of the words I know:
Long a: Atheist, amoral.
Short a: Amnesia, appertain, addict, affix (noun).
Schwa: Affix (verb, unstressed).
Which does raise the question for me: ¿Are there any English words in which a schwa occurs in a stressed syllable?
Brett said,
October 5, 2025 @ 3:55 pm
@Chas Belov: I feel like the second syllable of desultory has a unusual stressed schwa.
Philip Taylor said,
October 5, 2025 @ 4:59 pm
Does it differ from the verb sound in "pull", Brett ? It doesn't for me.
Garrett Wollman said,
October 5, 2025 @ 5:02 pm
A use the comic missed due to the changing times: if it's from the phone book, it's to make the listing sort earlier. Not too much point in being "A A A-1 Auto Repair" any more.
Gokul Madhavan said,
October 5, 2025 @ 11:15 pm
In Indian classrooms, it is still common to order students by alphabetical order of their first names. As children might sometimes also be seated in this order, parents who want their kids to sit at the front of the class often give them names starting with two As. Spellings like “Aaditya” which would formerly have been spelled “Aditya” (though pronounced exactly the same) are now not uncommon.
In my childhood, it was usually enough if your name started with “A”, but within a generation the battle has escalated to two “A”s. Perhaps in another generation, we may be looking at Indian names spelled with three “A”s (that is, assuming schools exist a generation from now.)
J.W. Brewer said,
October 6, 2025 @ 7:37 am
I can't really distinguish the vowel in the stressed second syllable of "desultory" from that of the stressed first syllable of "sultry." But "pull" is totally different for me: the FOOT vowel versus the STRUT vowel in the other two. Apparently FOOT & STRUT are commonly merged in North-of-England dialects but not in South-of-England (or North American) dialects?
J.W. Brewer said,
October 6, 2025 @ 7:54 am
Relatedly, the internet has plenty of prescriptivists who are eager to tell me that if I pronounce "desultory" with second-syllable stress rather than first-syllable stress I am Doing It Wrong.* I imagine that first-syllable stress would indeed reduce the second syllable to schwa.
*It does seem possible that a preference for second-syllable stress is driven by an arguably misplaced analogy to the etymologically unrelated "sultry" …
Michael Watts said,
October 6, 2025 @ 3:24 pm
I would not distinguish "desultory" from sultry or from pull. I agree that "pull" is a good paradigm for the syllable type.
I don't actually know what it would mean to use FOOT or STRUT in a syllable that ends in /l/. By convention my phonetics class said that "pull" was spelled /pʊl/, implying that the vowel is FOOT. But even in a rhyming context where "foot" rhymes (or rather, shares a vowel) with "look", I don't think it's possible to rhyme "foot" with "pull", because those two syllables do not share a vowel.
(I also feel this way about syllables ending in /g/ – "hat" and "hack" share a vowel, but "hag" doesn't share it with them.)
J.W. Brewer said,
October 7, 2025 @ 6:32 am
A question for MIchael Watts about his idiolect. Do e.g. pull and full, conventionally IPA'd with -ʊl, rhyme perfectly for him with e.g. dull or hull, conventionally IPA'd with -ʌl? If not, how would he distinguish the vowels other than as FOOT v. STRUT?
Philip Taylor said,
October 7, 2025 @ 6:46 am
When you say ""do not share a vowel", Michael, are you speaking orthographically, phonetically or in terms of John Wells lexical sets ? For me, incidentally, the vowel sound of the second syllable of "desultory" is very different to the first vowel sound of "sultry" (/ə/ v. /ʌ/)
Philip Taylor said,
October 7, 2025 @ 6:57 am
Or, perhaps, on reflection, (/ʊ/ v. /ʌ/).
Michael Watts said,
October 8, 2025 @ 6:26 pm
Yes, they do. I was not even aware that some words were "conventionally IPA'd with -ʌl". I was taught -ʊl and it never occurred to me that there might be a second category.
If we want to be precise, I'm speaking in terms of the criterion I mentioned: I do not feel that poetry allows those syllables to be paired where rhyming/assonant syllables are called for.
I think this is a stronger criterion than "there is a phonetic difference". For example, I feel that there is a vestigial-but-nonphonemic phonetic difference between the vowels in "egg" and "bag". You could probably distinguish these better than chance with a waveform analysis, but I wouldn't be shocked to see them rhymed in poetry. I think "full" and "foot" are more distinct than that.
I would be willing to call this a difference in "lexical sets", but probably not one in "John Wells lexical sets", which seem to be defined by an external document. I've complained in the past that the John Wells set CURE contains several different phonemically distinct vowels, making it meaningless to me except as an arbitrary list. Many John Wells sets are identical to me, so if I claim that a word is in LOT, I would not ever mean to distinguish that from CLOTH, and I would not consider myself to have made a mistake if John Wells himself listed that word in CLOTH.
I like the concept of defining the vowel in a word by comparing it (as being more or less identical) to the vowel in another word, and I frequently refer to lexical sets in this way. But I'll always use myself as a reference for those sets unless I specifically state otherwise.
I particularly appreciate the fact that the John Wells sets treat vowels followed by /ɹ/ as their own category. I think that's a good choice! But I think /ɹ/ isn't the only consonant with a strong enough influence on preceding vowels to redefine them. I'm a lot happier saying that "bag" belongs to SQUARE than I am saying it belongs to TRAP or DRESS.
My instinct is to pronounce "desultory" with antepenultimate stress, in which case the vowel I used would be identical to "pull". I see that the standard calls for stress on the first and third syllables; if I adopted that, the vowel I used in the second syllable would be /ə/. (Or, depending on perspective, a syllabic L.)
Michael Watts said,
October 8, 2025 @ 6:29 pm
(From trying to perceive what I'm doing with my tongue, I would guess that -ʌl is more accurate than -ʊl is, for me. But I wouldn't want to say anything definite about that without a more objective analysis.)
Chas Belov said,
October 11, 2025 @ 9:21 am
Hmm, I pronounce desultory with primary stress on the de and secondary stress on the tor. Although it's a word I've rarely used. I think I've only encountered it once, in the title of a Simon and Garfunkle song, A Simple Desultory Philippic. (And now I have to go look up philippic.)
Philip Taylor said,
October 12, 2025 @ 11:49 am
Ah, so you presumably have quadri-syllabic "desultory", Chas — I have tri-syllabic : /ˈdez ʊl tri/.