U+10500 "𐔀" Elbasan Letter A Unicode Character
Unicode Version 17.0
𐔀
U+10500 "𐔀" Elbasan Letter A is the first letter of the Elbasan script, an ancient and historically significant alphabet used primarily in the 18th century for writing the Albanian language within central Albania. This character represents the basic vowel sound /a/ and is part of a unique writing system invented by Bishop Gregory of Elbasan, designed to promote literacy and religious education among Albanian speakers during the Ottoman era. The Elbasan script, though short-lived in practice, holds considerable value for paleographic and historical linguistic study, offering insight into the cultural and intellectual efforts to preserve and transcribe the Albanian language before the adoption of the modern Latin-based alphabet.
General Properties
| Code Point | U+10500 |
| Version Added | 7.0 |
| Name | Elbasan Letter A |
| Block | Elbasan |
| General Category | Other Letter |
| Canonical Combining Class | Not Reordered |
| Bidirectional Class | Left To Right |
Encodings
| HTML Decimal Encoding | 𐔀 |
| HTML Hex Encoding | 𐔀 |
| UTF-8 Encoding | 0xF0 0x90 0x94 0x80 |
| UTF-16 Encoding | 0xD801 0xDD00 |
| UTF-32 Encoding | 0x00010500 |
| C/C++/Java Escape | \ud801\udd00 |