The First Letter of the Alphabet

A is just the first letter of the alphabet. Olive was originally a word that just meant ox, right? And then once it became an actual letter in the alphabet, then it's just, it's the opening letter. That's why you can reduce thousands of pictographs to 22 letters. Because with those letters you could spell words. But those letters no longer have the pictograph meaning. The shape of the letter changes over the years. So you can't even recognize what the original was.