A (Cyrillic)
A (А а; italics: А а) is a letter of the Cyrillic script. It commonly represents an open central unrounded vowel /a/, like the pronunciation of ⟨a⟩ in "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 had a value of 1.
Form
Through history the Cyrillic letter A has had various shapes, but today is standardised on one that looks exactly like the Latin letter A, including the italic forms.
Usage
In most languages that use the Cyrillic alphabet – such as Ukrainian, Belarusian, Russian, Serbian, Macedonian and Bulgarian – 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
- A a : Latin letter A
- Ă ă : Latin letter A with breve, used in Romanian language and Vietnamese language.
- Ä ä : Latin letter A with diaeresis
- Â â : Latin letter A with circumflex, after used in Vietnamese letter 3rd.
- Α α : Greek letter Alpha
Computing codes
A (Cyrillic)
Pronunciation of name of Cyrillic 'A' | |
Problems playing this file? See media help. |
Character | А | а | ||
---|---|---|---|---|
Unicode name | CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER A | CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER A | ||
Encodings | decimal | hex | decimal | 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 |
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
- ↑ "Tuvan language, alphabet and pronunciation". omniglot.com. Retrieved 14 June 2016.
- ↑ Campbell, George L.; King, Gareth (24 July 2013). "Compendium of the World's Languages". Routledge. Retrieved 14 June 2016 – via Google Books.