À

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Latin letter A with grave Latin letter A with grave.svg
Latin letter A with grave

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.

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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

Emilian-Romagnol

À is used in Emilian to represent short stressed [a], e.g. Bolognese dialect sacàtt [saˈkatː] "sack".

French

The grave accent is used in the French language to differentiate homophones, e.g. la 'the.F.SG' and là 'there'.

Portuguese

À is used in Portuguese to represent a contraction of the feminine singular definite article a with the preposition a or the demonstrative aquele and its inflections and derivations (aquela, aquilo, aqueles, aquelas, aqueloutro(a), etc):

Ele foi à praia.
He went to the beach.
É igual àquela camisa que eu tinha.
It's identical to that shirt I had.

À is always unstressed, as opposed to Á and Â, which are always stressed.

Scottish Gaelic

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

References

  1. 1 2 Ross, Susan (2016). The standardisation of Scottish Gaelic orthography 1750-2007: a corpus approach (PhD thesis). University of Glasgow.
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