À
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À, à (a-grave) is a letter of the Catalan, Emilian-Romagnol, French, Italian, Maltese, Occitan, Portuguese, Sardinian, Scottish Gaelic,[1] Vietnamese, and Welsh languages consisting of the letter A of the ISO basic Latin alphabet and a grave accent. À is also used in Pinyin transliteration. In most languages, it represents the vowel a. This letter is also a letter in Taos to indicate a mid tone.
In accounting or invoices, à abbreviates "at a rate of": "5 apples à $1" (one dollar each). That usage is based upon the French preposition à and has evolved into the at sign (@). Sometimes, it is part of a surname: Thomas à Kempis, Mary Anne à Beckett.
Usage in various languages
[edit]Emilian-Romagnol
[edit]À is used in Emilian to represent short stressed [a], e.g. Bolognese dialect sacàtt [saˈkatː] "sack".
French
[edit]The grave accent is used in the French language to differentiate homophones, e.g. la 'the.F.SG' and là 'there'.
Portuguese
[edit]À is used in Portuguese to represent a contraction of the feminine singular definite article A with the preposition A:
- Ele foi à praia.
- He went to the beach.
Scottish Gaelic
[edit]In early orthographic descriptions of Scottish Gaelic from the 18th and 19th centuries, à is the only way to represent a long [a]; later forms of Scottish Gaelic also used the acute accent [á] to indicate a longer [a] sound.[1]
Character mappings
[edit]| Preview | À | à | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Unicode name | LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH GRAVE | LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH GRAVE | ||
| Encodings | decimal | hex | dec | hex |
| Unicode | 192 | U+00C0 | 224 | U+00E0 |
| UTF-8 | 195 128 | C3 80 | 195 160 | C3 A0 |
| Numeric character reference | À |
À |
à |
à |
| Named character reference | À | à | ||
| ISO 8859-1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 10, 14, 15, 16 | 192 | C0 | 224 | E0 |
Microsoft Windows users can type an "à" by pressing Alt+133 or Alt+0224 on the numeric pad of the keyboard. "À" can be typed by pressing Alt+0192. On a Mac, you hold ⌥ Option+`, and then let go and type a. Similarly on a GNU/Linux system, where the Compose key can be configured.
References
[edit]- ^ a b Ross, Susan (2016). The standardisation of Scottish Gaelic orthography 1750-2007: a corpus approach (PhD thesis). University of Glasgow.
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