А

From Textus Receptus

Revision as of 14:04, 8 January 2011

A (А, а; italics А, а) is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet.

It commonly represents an open front unrounded vowel /a/.

In the romanization systems for the Russian, Bulgarian, and Ukrainian languages it is romanized using the Latin letter A.

Letter А in ABC by Elisabeth Bohm

History

The Cyrillic letter A was derived directly from the Greek letter Alpha (Α, α).

In the Early Cyrillic alphabet its name was Template:Script (azǔ), meaning 'I'.

In the Cyrillic numeral system, the Cyrillic letter A had a value of 1.

Form

Through history the Cyrillic letter А 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 Russian, Serbian, Macedonian and Bulgarian – the Cyrillic letter A represents an open front unrounded vowel /a/.

It is also used in the Ingush and Chechen languages to represent /ɑ/ and /ə/.

Code positions

See also

• A, a (Latin)
• Α, α - Alpha (Greek)