A (

hiragana is a Japanese syllabary, part of the Japanese writing system, along with ''katakana'' as well as ''kanji''. It is a phonetic lettering system. The word ''hiragana'' literally means "flowing" or "simple" kana ("simple" originally as contrast ...

: 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 f ...

: ア) is a Japanese

kana The term may refer to a number of syllabaries used to write Japanese phonological units, morae. Such syllabaries include (1) the original kana, or , which were Chinese characters (kanji) used phonetically to transcribe Japanese, the most p ...

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

kanji are the logographic Chinese characters taken from the Chinese family of scripts, Chinese script and 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 ...

, 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 t ...

, 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 the founder of the Shingon Esoteric sect of Buddhism in Japan, Kūkai, but more modern research has found the date of composition to be later in the Heian period (794–1179). Th ...

, after て, before さ. The

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, wh ...

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 thi ...

, 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, spoken in Okinawa Island, was once the official language of the Ryukyu Kingdom. At the time, documents were written in kanji and hiragana, derived from Japan. Although generally agreed among linguists to be a distinct language, most ...

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. History Today, with few exceptions, there is only one hiragana for each of the forty-five moras that are written without diacritics or digraphs. However, traditionally there ...

, 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 syllable should be pronounced voiced, for instance, on sounds that have undergone rendaku (sequential voicing). The , ...

(あ゙, ア゙) are used to represent either a gurgling sound, a

voiced pharyngeal fricative The voiced pharyngeal approximant or fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is ?\. Epiglott ...

(), or other similarly articulated sound.

Stroke order

The Hiragana あ is made with three

strokes A stroke is a medical condition in which poor blood flow to the brain causes cell death. There are two main types of stroke: ischemic, due to lack of blood flow, and hemorrhagic, due to bleeding. Both cause parts of the brain to stop funct ...

: #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" syllables 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