Ā
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- For A. E. van Vogt's novel, see The World of Null-A.
Ā, lowercase ā, is a grapheme, a Latin A with a macron, is used in several orthographies.
In the Latvian alphabet, Ā represents a distinct vowel and comes after A and before B in alphabetical order: for instance baznīca comes before bārda in a Latvian dictionary. It is considered as a separate letter in the Latvian alphabet. Ā is used to denote a long A in Latvian.
In some languages Ā is used to denote a long A. Examples are the Polynesian languages, including Māori, some romanizations of Japanese (rōmaji) and Arabic, and some Latin texts (especially for learners). It is used in some orthography-based transcriptions of English to represent the diphthong [eɪ] ([eː] in some dialects), and also in commercial names such as Drāno and Powerāde.
In Pinyin, Ā denotes A in the first tone of Mandarin Chinese.
In all these languages, Ā is sorted with other As and is not considered a separate letter. The macron is only considered when sorting words that are otherwise identical. For example, in Māori, tāu (meaning your) comes after tau (meaning year), but before taumata (hill).
[edit] Unicode
In Unicode, Ā is code 256 (hex 100) and ā is code 257 (hex 101). These are the first codes that come after the initial ISO-8859-1 subset of Unicode.
| The Basic modern Latin alphabet | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aa | Bb | Cc | Dd | Ee | Ff | Gg | Hh | Ii | Jj | Kk | Ll | Mm | Nn | Oo | Pp | Rr | Ss | Tt | Uu | Vv | Ww | Xx | Yy | Zz | |
|
Letter A with diacritics
Letters using macron sign
history • palaeography • derivations • diacritics • punctuation • numerals • Unicode • list of letters • ISO/IEC 646 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||
