Home U+0800 to U+083F Samaritan
Glyph for U+0800
Source: Noto Sans Samaritan

U+0800 Samaritan Letter Alaf

U+0800 was added to Unicode in version 5.2 (2009). It belongs to the block U+0800 to U+083F Samaritan in the U+0000 to U+FFFF Basic Multilingual Plane.

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

The glyph is not a composition. It has a Neutral East Asian Width. In bidirectional context it acts as Right To Left and is not mirrored. In text U+0800 behaves as Alphabetic regarding line breaks. It has type Other Letter for sentence and Alphabetic Letter for word breaks. The Grapheme Cluster Break is Any.

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 Phoenician ʾālep 𐤀, Hebrew ʾālef א, Aramaic ʾālap 𐡀, Syriac ʾālap̄ ܐ, Arabic alif ا and North Arabian 𐪑. 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 אֶלֶף‎ ʾelef, "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]). 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 , based on the Greek spiritus lenis ʼ; for example, in the transliteration of the letter name itself, ʾāleph.

Representations

System Representation
2048
UTF-8 E0 A0 80
UTF-16 08 00
UTF-32 00 00 08 00
URL-Quoted %E0%A0%80
HTML hex reference ࠀ
Wrong windows-1252 Mojibake à €

Elsewhere

Complete Record

Property Value
Age 5.2 (2009)
Unicode Name SAMARITAN LETTER ALAF
Unicode 1 Name
Block Samaritan
General Category Other Letter
Script Samaritan
Bidirectional Category Right To Left
Combining Class Not Reordered
Decomposition Type None
Decomposition Mapping Glyph for U+0800 Samaritan Letter Alaf
Lowercase
Simple Lowercase Mapping Glyph for U+0800 Samaritan Letter Alaf
Lowercase Mapping Glyph for U+0800 Samaritan Letter Alaf
Uppercase
Simple Uppercase Mapping Glyph for U+0800 Samaritan Letter Alaf
Uppercase Mapping Glyph for U+0800 Samaritan Letter Alaf
Simple Titlecase Mapping Glyph for U+0800 Samaritan Letter Alaf
Titlecase Mapping Glyph for U+0800 Samaritan Letter Alaf
Case Folding Glyph for U+0800 Samaritan Letter Alaf
ASCII Hex Digit
Alphabetic
Bidi Control
Bidi Mirrored
Composition Exclusion
Case Ignorable
Changes When Casefolded
Changes When Casemapped
Changes When NFKC Casefolded
Changes When Lowercased
Changes When Titlecased
Changes When Uppercased
Cased
Full Composition Exclusion
Default Ignorable Code Point
Dash
Deprecated
Diacritic
Emoji Modifier Base
Emoji Component
Emoji Modifier
Emoji Presentation
Emoji
Extender
Extended Pictographic
FC NFKC Closure Glyph for U+0800 Samaritan Letter Alaf
Grapheme Cluster Break Any
Grapheme Base
Grapheme Extend
Grapheme Link
Hex Digit
Hyphen
ID Continue
ID Start
IDS Binary Operator
IDS Trinary Operator and
Ideographic
Indic Mantra Category
Indic Positional Category NA
Indic Syllabic Category Other
Jamo Short Name
Join Control
Logical Order Exception
Math
Noncharacter Code Point
NFC Quick Check Yes
NFD Quick Check Yes
NFKC Casefold Glyph for U+0800 Samaritan Letter Alaf
NFKC Quick Check Yes
NFKD Quick Check Yes
Other Alphabetic
Other Default Ignorable Code Point
Other Grapheme Extend
Other ID Continue
Other ID Start
Other Lowercase
Other Math
Other Uppercase
Prepended Concatenation Mark
Pattern Syntax
Pattern White Space
Quotation Mark
Regional Indicator
Radical
Sentence Break Other Letter
Soft Dotted
Sentence Terminal
Terminal Punctuation
Unified Ideograph
Variation Selector
Word Break Alphabetic Letter
White Space
XID Continue
XID Start
Expands On NFC
Expands On NFD
Expands On NFKC
Expands On NFKD
Bidi Paired Bracket Glyph for U+0800 Samaritan Letter Alaf
Bidi Paired Bracket Type None
East Asian Width Neutral
Hangul Syllable Type Not Applicable
ISO 10646 Comment
Joining Group No_Joining_Group
Joining Type Non Joining
Line Break Alphabetic
Numeric Type None
Numeric Value not a number
Simple Case Folding Glyph for U+0800 Samaritan Letter Alaf
Script Extension
Vertical Orientation R