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Ā, lowercase ā ("A with macron"), is a grapheme, a Latin A with a macron, used in several orthographies.Ā is used to denote a long A.Examples are the Baltic languages (e.g. Latvian), Polynesian languages, including Māori and Moriori, some romanizations of Japanese, Persian, Pashto, Assyrian Neo-Aramaic (which represents a long A sound) and Arabic, and some Latin texts (especially for ...
A macron (/ ˈ m æ k r ɒ n, ˈ m eɪ-/ MAK-ron, MAY-) is a diacritical mark: it is a straight bar ¯ placed above a letter, usually a vowel. Its name derives from Ancient Greek μακρόν ( makrón ) 'long' because it was originally used to mark long or heavy syllables in Greco-Roman metrics .
This is a list of letters of the Latin script. The definition of a Latin-script letter for this list is a character encoded in the Unicode Standard that has a script property of 'Latin' and the general category of 'Letter'. An overview of the distribution of Latin-script letters in Unicode is given in Latin script in Unicode.
Some sources distinguish "diacritical marks" (marks upon standard letters in the A–Z 26-letter alphabet) from "special characters" (letters not marked but radically modified from the standard 26-letter alphabet) such as Old English and Icelandic eth (Ð, ð) and thorn (uppercase Þ, lowercase þ), and ligatures such as Latin and Anglo-Saxon Æ (minuscule: æ), and German eszett (ß; final ...
In most forms of Latin scribal abbreviation, an overline or macron indicates omitted letters similar to use of apostrophes in English contractions. Letters with macrons or overlines continue to be used in medical abbreviations in various European languages, particularly for prescriptions. Common examples include a, a̅, or ā for ante ("before")
The lists and tables below summarize and compare the letter inventories of some of the Latin-script alphabets.In this article, the scope of the word "alphabet" is broadened to include letters with tone marks, and other diacritics used to represent a wide range of orthographic traditions, without regard to whether or how they are sequenced in their alphabet or the table.
The tittle (dot) on the letter i or the letter j , of the Latin alphabet originated as a diacritic to clearly distinguish i from the minims (downstrokes) of adjacent letters. It first appeared in the 11th century in the sequence ii (as in ingeníí ), then spread to i adjacent to m, n, u , and finally to all lowercase i s.
The term Latin alphabet may refer to either the alphabet used to write Latin (as described in this article) or other alphabets based on the Latin script, which is the basic set of letters common to the various alphabets descended from the classical Latin alphabet, such as the English alphabet.