Ă
Ă (upper case) or ă (lower case), usually referred to in English as A-breve, is a letter used in standard Romanian and Vietnamese orthographies. In Romanian, it is used to represent the mid-central unrounded vowel, while in Vietnamese it represents the short a sound. It is the second letter of the Romanian, Vietnamese, and the pre-1972 Malaysian alphabets, after A.
Ă/ă is also used in several languages for transliteration of Bulgarian letter Ъ/ъ.
Romanian[edit]
The sound represented in Romanian by ă is a mid-central vowel /ə/, i.e. schwa. Unlike in English, Catalan and French but like in Indonesian (using ā (a with macron) rather than ă, e.g. diām /diʌm/ ("quiet")), Bulgarian, Albanian and Afrikaans, the vowel can be stressed. There are words in which it is the only vowel, such as măr /mər/ ("apple") or văd /vəd/ ("I see"). Additionally, some words that also contain other vowels can have the stress on ă like cărțile /ˈkərt͡sile/ ("the books") and odăi /oˈdəj/ ("rooms").
Vietnamese[edit]
Ă is the 2nd letter of the Vietnamese alphabet and represents /a/. Because Vietnamese is a tonal language this letter may have any one of the 5 tonal symbols above or below it (or even no accent at all, since the Vietnamese first tone is identified by the lack of accent marks). See Vietnamese phonology.
- Ằ ằ
- Ắ ắ
- Ẳ ẳ
- Ẵ ẵ
- Ặ ặ
Malay[edit]
The sound represented in pre-1972 Malaysian orthography by ă is a vowel. It occurred in the final syllable of the root word such as lamă /lamə/ ("long", "old"), mată /matə/ ("eye"), and sană /sanə/ ("there"). The letter was replaced in 1972 with a in the New Rumi Spelling.
Khmer[edit]
Ă or ă are used in Khmer romanization, e.g. Preăh Réachéanachăk Kămpŭchéa (Kingdom of Cambodia).
Pronunciation respelling for English[edit]
In some systems for Pronunciation respelling for English including American Heritage Dictionary notation, ă represents the short A sound, /æ/.
Character mappings[edit]
Preview | ă | Ă | ||
---|---|---|---|---|
Unicode name | LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH BREVE | LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH BREVE | ||
Encodings | decimal | hex | dec | hex |
Unicode | 259 | U+0103 | 258 | U+0102 |
UTF-8 | 196 131 | C4 83 | 196 130 | C4 82 |
Numeric character reference | ă |
ă |
Ă |
Ă |
Named character reference | ă | Ă | ||
ISO 8859-1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 10, 14, 15, 16 | 259 | 103 | 258 | 102 |
See also[edit]
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Look up ă in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. |
- A with breve (Cyrillic), Cyrillic letter а with breve, visually indistinguishable
- Breve