U+10A71 "𐩱" Old South Arabian Letter Alef Unicode Character

U+10A71 "𐩱" Old South Arabian Letter Alef is a glyph from the Old South Arabian script, a writing system used between roughly the 9th century BCE and the 6th century CE to inscribe the languages of ancient civilizations in the southern Arabian Peninsula, such as Saba, Qataban, and Himyar. Character U+10A71 specifically represents the first letter of the alphabet, the glottal consonant sound /ʔ/ (similar to the English "aleph" or Arabic "alif"), and it appears in monumental stone inscriptions and carvings found across modern-day Yemen and Oman. This character is part of the Unicode Old South Arabian block, encoded to preserve and digitally represent the historical texts of these pre‑Islamic Arabian cultures, which are crucial for understanding the region's linguistic and cultural heritage.

General Properties

Code Point	U+10A71
Version Added	5.2
Name	Old South Arabian Letter Alef
Block	Old South Arabian
General Category	Other Letter
Canonical Combining Class	Not Reordered
Bidirectional Class	Right To Left

Encodings

HTML Decimal Encoding	𐩱
HTML Hex Encoding	𐩱
UTF-8 Encoding	0xF0 0x90 0xA9 0xB1
UTF-16 Encoding	0xD802 0xDE71
UTF-32 Encoding	0x00010A71
C/C++/Java Escape	\ud802\ude71

Unicode Properties

NFC Quick Check	Yes
NFD Quick Check	Yes
NFKC Quick Check	Yes
NFKD Quick Check	Yes
Numeric Type	None
Numeric Value	NaN
Line Break	Alphabetic
Script	Old South Arabian
Script Extensions	Old South Arabian
Indic Syllabic Category	Other
ID Start	Yes
XID Start	Yes
ID Continue	Yes
XID Continue	Yes
Alphabetic	Yes
Vertical Orientation	Rotated
Grapheme Base	Yes
Grapheme Cluster Break	Other
Word Break	Alphabetic letter
Sentence Break	OLetter