Battle of Chustenahlah

Letter А, page from Elisabeth Boehm's Azbuka

А (А а; italics: А а) is a letter of the Cyrillic script. It commonly represents an open central unrounded vowel /ä/, halfway between the pronunciation of ⟨a⟩ in "cat" and "father". The Cyrillic letter А is romanized using the Latin letter A.

History

The Cyrillic letter А was derived directly from the Greek letter Alpha (Α α). In the Early Cyrillic alphabet its name was азъ (azǔ), meaning "I". In the Cyrillic numeral system, the Cyrillic letter А has a value of 1.

Form

Throughout history, the Cyrillic letter А has had various shapes, but today is standardised on one that looks exactly like the Latin letter A, including the italic and lower case forms.

Usage

In most languages that use the Cyrillic alphabet – such as Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Russian, Rusyn, Serbian, Macedonian and Montenegrin – the Cyrillic letter А represents the open central unrounded vowel /a/. In Ingush and Chechen the Cyrillic letter А represents both the open back unrounded vowel /ɑ/ and the mid-central vowel /ə/. In Tuvan the letter can be written as a double vowel.[1][2]

Related letters and other similar characters

Computing codes

Character information
Preview А а
Unicode name CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER A CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER A
Encodings decimal hex dec hex
Unicode 1040 U+0410 1072 U+0430
UTF-8 208 144 D0 90 208 176 D0 B0
Numeric character reference А А а а
Named character reference А а
KOI8-R and KOI8-U 225 E1 193 C1
CP 855 161 A1 160 A0
Windows-1251 192 C0 224 E0
ISO-8859-5 176 B0 208 D0
Mac Cyrillic 128 80 224 E0

See also

References

  1. ^ "Tuvan language, alphabet and pronunciation". omniglot.com. Retrieved 14 June 2016.
  2. ^ Campbell, George L.; King, Gareth (24 July 2013). Compendium of the World's Languages. Routledge. ISBN 9781136258459. Retrieved 14 June 2016 – via Google Books.

External links

  • The dictionary definition of А at Wiktionary
  • The dictionary definition of а at Wiktionary

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