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Ă (upper case) oră (lower case), usually referred to in English asA-breve, is aletter used in standardRomanian andVietnameseorthographies. In Romanian, it is used to represent themid-central unrounded vowel, while in Vietnamese it represents the shorta sound. It is the second letter of theRomanian,Vietnamese, and the pre-1972Malaysian alphabets, afterA.
Ă/ă is also used in several languages fortransliteration of theBulgarian letterЪ/ъ.[1]
The sound represented inRomanian byă is amid-central vowel/ə/, i.e.schwa.[1][2] Unlike inEnglish,Catalan andFrench but like inIndonesian (usinge rather thană), the vowel can be stressed.[3] There are words in which it is the only vowel, such asmăr/mər/ ("apple") orvăd/vəd/ ("I see"). Additionally, some words that also contain other vowels can have the stress onă likecărțile/ˈkərt͡sile/ ("the books") andodăi/oˈdəj/ ("rooms"). Another grapheme <a> with diacritic in Romanian is <â>.
Ă is the 2nd letter of theVietnamese alphabet and represents/ă/. Because Vietnamese is atonal 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 alsoVietnamese phonology): Ằ ằ, Ắ ắ, Ẳ ẳ, Ẵ ẵ, Ặ ặ.[4]
The sound represented in pre-1972Malaysian orthography byă is a vowel. It occurred in the final syllable of the root word such aslamă/lamə/ ("long", "old"),mată/matə/ ("eye"), andsană/sanə/ ("there"). The letter was replaced in 1972 witha in theNew Rumi Spelling.
Ă or ă are used inBalinese romanization, e.g.Kabupatén Tăbăṅan (Tabanan Regency ).
In some systems forPronunciation respelling for English includingAmerican Heritage Dictionary notation,ă represents theshort 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 8859-2,16 | 259 | 103 | 258 | 102 |
