A (

hiragana is a Japanese language, Japanese syllabary, part of the Japanese writing system, along with ''katakana'' as well as ''kanji''. It is a phonetic lettering system. The word ''hiragana'' means "common" or "plain" kana (originally also "easy", ...

: あ,

katakana is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji and in some cases the Latin script (known as rōmaji). The word ''katakana'' means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana characters are derived fr ...

: ア) is a Japanese

kana are syllabary, syllabaries used to write Japanese phonology, Japanese phonological units, Mora (linguistics), morae. In current usage, ''kana'' most commonly refers to ''hiragana'' and ''katakana''. It can also refer to their ancestor , wh ...

that represents the mora consisting of single vowel . The hiragana character あ is based on the sōsho style of

kanji are logographic Chinese characters, adapted from Chinese family of scripts, Chinese script, used in the writing of Japanese language, Japanese. They were made a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese and are ...

, while the katakana ア is from the radical of kanji . In the modern Japanese system of

alphabetical order Alphabetical order is a system whereby character strings are placed in order based on the position of the characters in the conventional ordering of an alphabet. It is one of the methods of collation. In mathematics, a lexicographical order is ...

, it occupies the first position of the alphabet, before い. Additionally, it is the 36th letter in

Iroha The is a Japanese poem. Originally the poem was attributed to Kūkai, the founder of Shingon Buddhism, but more modern research has found the date of composition to be later in the Heian period (794–1179). The first record of its existence ...

, after て, before さ. The

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

for あ is U+3042, and the Unicode for ア is U+30A2.

Derivation

The katakana ア derives, via

man'yōgana is an ancient writing system that uses Chinese characters to represent the Japanese language. It was the first known kana system to be developed as a means to represent the Japanese language phonetically. The date of the earliest usage of t ...

, from the left element of

. The hiragana あ derives from cursive simplification of the kanji .

Variant forms

Scaled-down versions of the kana (ぁ, ァ) are used to express sounds foreign to the Japanese language, such as ファ (fa). In some

Okinawan writing system Okinawan language, Okinawan, spoken in Okinawa Island. Documents in Ryukyu Kingdom were written in kanji and hiragana, derived from Japan. Although generally agreed among Linguistics, linguists to be a distinct language, most Japanese, as well ...

s, a small ぁ is also combined with the kana く (''ku'') and ふ (''fu'' or ''hu'') to form the digraphs くぁ ''kwa'' and ふぁ ''hwa'', although others use a small ゎ instead. In

hentaigana In the Japanese writing system, are variant forms of hiragana. Description In contrast to modern Japanese, originally hiragana had several forms for a single sound. For example, while the hiragana reading "ha" has only one form in modern ...

, a variant of あ is appeared with a stroke written exactly as '' wakanmuri''. The version of the kana with

dakuten The , colloquially , is a diacritic most often used in the Japanese kana syllabaries to indicate that the consonant of a mora should be pronounced voiced, for instance, on sounds that have undergone rendaku (sequential voicing). The , coll ...

(あ゙, ア゙) are used to represent either a gurgling sound, a voiced pharyngeal fricative (), or other similarly articulated sound.

Stroke order

The Hiragana あ is made with three strokes: #At the top, a horizontal stroke from left to right. #A downward vertical stroke starting above and in the center of the last stroke. #At the bottom, a loop like the Hiragana の. The Katakana ア is made with two strokes:Gilhooly (2003) p. 128 #At the top, a stroke consisting of a horizontal line and a short horizontal line proceeding downward and to the left. #Starting at the end of the last stroke, a curved line proceeding downward and to the left.

Other communicative representations

* Full Braille representation When lengthening "-a" morae in Japanese braille, a chōon is always used, as in standard katakana usage instead of adding an あ / ア. * Computer encodings

Footnotes

References

* {{DEFAULTSORT:A (Kana) Specific kana