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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 the Bulgarian letter Ъ/ъ.[1]
The sound represented in Romanianbyă is a mid-central vowel /ə/, i.e. schwa.[1][2] Unlike in English, Catalan and French but like in Indonesian (using e rather than ă), the vowel can be stressed.[3] 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"). Another grapheme <a> with diacritic in Romanian is <â>.
Ă is the 2nd letter of the Vietnamese alphabet and represents /ă/. 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 also Vietnamese phonology): Ằ ằ, Ắ ắ, Ẳ ẳ, Ẵ ẵ, Ặ ặ.[4]
The sound represented in pre-1972 Malaysian orthographybyă 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.
Ă or ă are used in Balinese romanization, e.g. Kabupatén Tăbăṅan (Tabanan Regency ).
In some systems for Pronunciation respelling for English including American Heritage Dictionary notation, ă represents the short A sound, /æ/.
| 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 8859-2, 3, 4, 9, 10, 14, 15, 16 | 259 | 103 | 258 | 102 |
