D

The Semitic letter Dâlet probably developed from the logogram for a fish or a door. There are various Egyptian hieroglyphs that might have inspired this. In Semitic, Ancient Greek, and Latin, the letter was pronounced /d/; in the Etruscan alphabet the letter was superfluous, but still maintained (see letter B). Greek letter: Δ (capital) or δ (small) (Delta).^{[citation needed]}

The minuscule (lower-case) form of D consists of a loop and a tall vertical stroke. It developed by gradual variations on the majuscule (capital) form. In handwriting, it was common to start the arc to the left of the vertical stroke, resulting in a serif at the top of the arc. This serif was extended while the rest of the letter was reduced, resulting in an angled stroke and loop. The angled stroke slowly developed into a vertical stroke.

[edit] Usage

In most languages using the Latin alphabet, the letter d represents the sound /d/, but in the Vietnamese alphabet it represents the sound /z/ in the north and /j/ in the south. In Fijian it stands for the prenasalized stop /nd/. In some languages where voiceless unaspirated stops contrast with voiceless aspirated stops, d represents an unaspirated /t/, while t represents an aspirated /tʰ/. Examples of such languages include Icelandic, Scottish Gaelic, Navajo, and the Pinyin transliteration of Mandarin.

[edit] Codes for computing

Alternative representations of D

NATO phonetic		Morse code
Delta		–··
Image:ICS Delta.svg	Image:Semaphore Delta.svg	Image:Sign language D.svg	Image:Braille D4.svg
Signal flag	Flag semaphore	ASL Manual	Braille

In Unicode the capital D is codepoint U+0044 and the lowercase d is U+0064.

The ASCII code for capital D is 68 and for lowercase the d is 100; or in binary 01000100 and 01100100, correspondingly.

The EBCDIC code for capital D is 196 and for lowercase d is 132.

The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "D" and "d" for upper and lower case respectively.

[edit] References

^ "D" Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989); Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1993); "dee," op. cit.

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