Home: go to the homepage U+10900 to U+1091F Phoenician
Glyph for U+10900
Source: Noto Sans Phoenician

U+10900 Phoenician Letter Alf

U+10900 was added in Unicode version 5.0 in 2006. It belongs to the block U+10900 to U+1091F Phoenician in the U+10000 to U+1FFFF Supplementary Multilingual Plane.

This character is a Other Letter and is mainly used in the Phoenician script.

The glyph is not a composition. It has no designated width in East Asian texts. In bidirectional text it is written from right to left. When changing direction it is not mirrored. The word that U+10900 forms with similar adjacent characters prevents a line break inside it.

The Wikipedia has the following information about this codepoint:

Aleph (or alef or alif, transliterated ʾ) is the first letter of the Semitic abjads, including Arabic ʾalif ا‎, Aramaic ʾālap 𐡀, Hebrew ʾālef א‎, North Arabian 𐪑, Phoenician ʾālep 𐤀, Syriac ʾālap̄ ܐ. It also appears as South Arabian 𐩱 and Ge'ez ʾälef አ.

These letters are believed to have derived from an Egyptian hieroglyph depicting an ox's head to describe the initial sound of *ʾalp, the West Semitic word for ox (compare Biblical Hebrew אֶלֶףʾelef, "ox"). The Phoenician variant gave rise to the Greek alpha (Α), being re-interpreted to express not the glottal consonant but the accompanying vowel, and hence the Latin A and Cyrillic А.

Phonetically, aleph originally represented the onset of a vowel at the glottis. In Semitic languages, this functions as a prosthetic weak consonant, allowing roots with only two true consonants to be conjugated in the manner of a standard three consonant Semitic root. In most Hebrew dialects as well as Syriac, the aleph is an absence of a true consonant, a glottal stop ([ʔ]), the sound found in the catch in uh-oh. In Arabic, the alif represents the glottal stop pronunciation when it is the initial letter of a word. In texts with diacritical marks, the pronunciation of an aleph as a consonant is rarely indicated by a special marking, hamza in Arabic and mappiq in Tiberian Hebrew. In later Semitic languages, aleph could sometimes function as a mater lectionis indicating the presence of a vowel elsewhere (usually long). When this practice began is the subject of some controversy, though it had become well established by the late stage of Old Aramaic (ca. 200 BCE). Aleph is often transliterated as U+02BE ʾ MODIFIER LETTER RIGHT HALF RING, based on the Greek spiritus lenis ʼ; for example, in the transliteration of the letter name itself, ʾāleph.

Representations

System Representation
67840
UTF-8 F0 90 A4 80
UTF-16 D8 02 DD 00
UTF-32 00 01 09 00
URL-Quoted %F0%90%A4%80
HTML hex reference 𐤀
Wrong windows-1252 Mojibake 𐤀
Encoding: GB18030 (hex bytes) 90 31 E9 34

Elsewhere

Complete Record

Property Value
Age (age) 5.0 (2006)
Unicode Name (na) PHOENICIAN LETTER ALF
Unicode 1 Name (na1)
Block (blk) Phoenician
General Category (gc) Other Letter
Script (sc) Phoenician
Bidirectional Category (bc) Right To Left
Combining Class (ccc) Not Reordered
Decomposition Type (dt) none
Decomposition Mapping (dm) Glyph for U+10900 Phoenician Letter Alf
Lowercase (Lower)
Simple Lowercase Mapping (slc) Glyph for U+10900 Phoenician Letter Alf
Lowercase Mapping (lc) Glyph for U+10900 Phoenician Letter Alf
Uppercase (Upper)
Simple Uppercase Mapping (suc) Glyph for U+10900 Phoenician Letter Alf
Uppercase Mapping (uc) Glyph for U+10900 Phoenician Letter Alf
Simple Titlecase Mapping (stc) Glyph for U+10900 Phoenician Letter Alf
Titlecase Mapping (tc) Glyph for U+10900 Phoenician Letter Alf
Case Folding (cf) Glyph for U+10900 Phoenician Letter Alf
ASCII Hex Digit (AHex)
Alphabetic (Alpha)
Bidi Control (Bidi_C)
Bidi Mirrored (Bidi_M)
Composition Exclusion (CE)
Case Ignorable (CI)
Changes When Casefolded (CWCF)
Changes When Casemapped (CWCM)
Changes When NFKC Casefolded (CWKCF)
Changes When Lowercased (CWL)
Changes When Titlecased (CWT)
Changes When Uppercased (CWU)
Cased (Cased)
Full Composition Exclusion (Comp_Ex)
Default Ignorable Code Point (DI)
Dash (Dash)
Deprecated (Dep)
Diacritic (Dia)
Emoji Modifier Base (EBase)
Emoji Component (EComp)
Emoji Modifier (EMod)
Emoji Presentation (EPres)
Emoji (Emoji)
Extender (Ext)
Extended Pictographic (ExtPict)
FC NFKC Closure (FC_NFKC) Glyph for U+10900 Phoenician Letter Alf
Grapheme Cluster Break (GCB) Any
Grapheme Base (Gr_Base)
Grapheme Extend (Gr_Ext)
Grapheme Link (Gr_Link)
Hex Digit (Hex)
Hyphen (Hyphen)
ID Continue (IDC)
ID Start (IDS)
IDS Binary Operator (IDSB)
IDS Trinary Operator and (IDST)
IDSU (IDSU) 0
ID_Compat_Math_Continue (ID_Compat_Math_Continue) 0
ID_Compat_Math_Start (ID_Compat_Math_Start) 0
Ideographic (Ideo)
InCB (InCB) None
Indic Mantra Category (InMC)
Indic Positional Category (InPC) NA
Indic Syllabic Category (InSC) Other
Jamo Short Name (JSN)
Join Control (Join_C)
Logical Order Exception (LOE)
Modifier Combining Mark (MCM)
Math (Math)
Noncharacter Code Point (NChar)
NFC Quick Check (NFC_QC) Yes
NFD Quick Check (NFD_QC) Yes
NFKC Casefold (NFKC_CF) Glyph for U+10900 Phoenician Letter Alf
NFKC Quick Check (NFKC_QC) Yes
NFKC_SCF (NFKC_SCF) Glyph for U+10900 Phoenician Letter Alf
NFKD Quick Check (NFKD_QC) Yes
Other Alphabetic (OAlpha)
Other Default Ignorable Code Point (ODI)
Other Grapheme Extend (OGr_Ext)
Other ID Continue (OIDC)
Other ID Start (OIDS)
Other Lowercase (OLower)
Other Math (OMath)
Other Uppercase (OUpper)
Prepended Concatenation Mark (PCM)
Pattern Syntax (Pat_Syn)
Pattern White Space (Pat_WS)
Quotation Mark (QMark)
Regional Indicator (RI)
Radical (Radical)
Sentence Break (SB) Other Letter
Soft Dotted (SD)
Sentence Terminal (STerm)
Terminal Punctuation (Term)
Unified Ideograph (UIdeo)
Variation Selector (VS)
Word Break (WB) Alphabetic Letter
White Space (WSpace)
XID Continue (XIDC)
XID Start (XIDS)
Expands On NFC (XO_NFC)
Expands On NFD (XO_NFD)
Expands On NFKC (XO_NFKC)
Expands On NFKD (XO_NFKD)
Bidi Paired Bracket (bpb) Glyph for U+10900 Phoenician Letter Alf
Bidi Paired Bracket Type (bpt) None
East Asian Width (ea) neutral
Hangul Syllable Type (hst) Not Applicable
ISO 10646 Comment (isc)
Joining Group (jg) No_Joining_Group
Joining Type (jt) Non Joining
Line Break (lb) Alphabetic
Numeric Type (nt) none
Numeric Value (nv) not a number
Simple Case Folding (scf) Glyph for U+10900 Phoenician Letter Alf
Script Extension (scx)
Vertical Orientation (vo) R