- 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 some languages Ā is used to denote a long A. Examples are the Baltic languages, Polynesian languages, some romanizations of Japanese (rōmaji), Persian, Pashto, and Arabic, and some Latin texts (especially for learners). In Romanised Mandarin Chinese (pinyin) it is used to represent A spoken with a level high tone (first tone). It is used in some orthography-based transcriptions of English to represent the diphthong /eɪ/, and also in commercial names such as Drāno and Powerāde.
In the International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration, Ā represents the open back unrounded vowel, आ, not to be confused with the similar Devanagari character for the mid central vowel, अ.
In the languages other than Sanskrit,[1] Ā is sorted with other A's 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).
Computer encoding
Character | Ā | ā | ||
---|---|---|---|---|
Unicode name | LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH MACRON | LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH MACRON | ||
Encodings | decimal | hex | decimal | hex |
Unicode | 256 | U+0100 | 257 | U+0101 |
UTF-8 | 196 128 | C4 80 | 196 129 | C4 81 |
Numeric character reference | Ā | Ā | ā | ā |
ISO 8859-4/10 | 192 | C0 | 224 | E0 |
ISO 8859-13 | 194 | C2 | 226 | E2 |
|
References
- ^ "Sanskrit Online Dictionary". http://sanskritdocuments.org. Retrieved 3 October 2012. External link in
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