For other uses, see Schwa. -, or -, is a letter derived from the Latin alphabet. Both glyphs of the majuscule and minuscule forms of this letter are based on the rotated form of a minuscule e; a similar letter with identical minuscule - is used in the Pan-Nigerian Alphabet, but has the capital form majuscule -, based on a horizontally flipped (or rotated) majuscule E.
The majuscule - is encoded in Unicode as U+018F while the minuscule - as U+0259. The Nigerian majuscule - is encoded as U+018E and the Nigerian minuscule - as U+01DD.
The letter was used in the Uniform Turkic Alphabet, for example, in Janalif for the Tatar language in the 1920s-1930s.
In the Latin Azerbaijani and Chechen alphabets, - represents the near-open front unrounded vowel, /æ/. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, minuscule - is used to represent the mid central vowel (see schwa).
When using -, the Azerbaijani language has problems with the Turkish encoding, so sometimes ä has been used instead, as in the Tatar language and Turkmen language.
In the Latin transliteration of Avestan, the corresponding long vowel is written as schwa-macron, --.
See also
|
