Ă
Ă (upper case) or ă (lower case), usually referred to in English as A-breve, is a letter used in standard Romanian language and Vietnamese language 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 both the Romanian, Vietnamese, and the pre-1972 Malaysian alphabets, after A.
Ă/ă is also used in the transliteration of Bulgarian letter Ъ/ъ.
Romanian
The sound represented in Romanian by ă is a mid-central vowel /ə/, i.e. schwa. Unlike in English, Catalan or French but like in Bulgarian and Afrikaans, it 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 which also contain other vowels can have the stress on ă like in the examples "cărțile" /ˈkərt͡sile/ (the books) and "odăi" /oˈdəj/ (rooms).
Vietnamese
Ă is the 2nd letter of the Vietnamese alphabet and represents /a/. Because Vietnamese is a tonal language this letter may optionally have any one of the 5 tonal symbols above or below it. See Vietnamese phonology.
- Ằ ằ
- Ắ ắ
- Ẳ ẳ
- Ẵ ẵ
- Ặ ặ
Malay
The sound represented in pre-1972 Malaysian orthography by ă is a vowel. It occurred only in the final syllable of the root word such "mată" /matə/ (eye). The letter was replaced in 1972 with a in the New Rumi Spelling.
Pronunciation respelling for English
In some systems for Pronunciation respelling for English including American Heritage Dictionary notation, ă represents the so-called "short A" sound, /æ/.
Character mappings
Character | ă | Ă | ||
---|---|---|---|---|
Unicode name | LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH BREVE | LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH BREVE | ||
Encodings | decimal | hex | decimal | 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 |
ISO 8859-1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 10, 14, 15, 16 | 259 | 103 | 258 | 102 |
See also
Look up ă in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. |
- A with breve (Cyrillic), Cyrillic letter а with breve, visually indistinguishable
- Breve