Hwair (also ƕair, huuair, hvair) is the name of , the Gothic alphabet expressing the or sound (reflected in English language by the inverted wh-spelling for ). Hwair is also the name of the Latin ligature ƕ (capital Ƕ) used to transcribe Gothic.
Name
The name of the Gothic letter is recorded by
Alcuin in Codex Vindobonensis 795 as
uuaer. The meaning of the name ƕair was probably "cauldron, pot"
[cognate with Sanskrit "pot"); see e.g. Karl Ljungstedt, Anmärkningar till det starka preteritum i germanska språk (1887), p. 165. Hans Jensen, 00Die Schrift in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart, 1935, p. 38 Kratylos vol. 1-2, 1956, p. 175.]
(cf.
ƕairnei "skull");
[Mark 15:22 ƕairneins staþs = κρανιου τοπος "Golgatha".] comparative reconstruction shows kʷer- ("a kind of dish or pot") in Proto-Indo-European.
There was no Elder Futhark rune for the phoneme, so that unlike those of most Gothic letters, the name does not continue the name of a rune (but see Qairþra).
Sound
Gothic
ƕ is the reflex of
Common Germanic xʷ, which in turn continues the Indo-European labiovelar kʷ after it underwent Grimm's law. The same phoneme in
Old English and Old High German is spelled
hw.
Transliteration
The Gothic letter is transliterated with the Latin ligature of the same name, , which was introduced by
Wilhelm Braune in the 1882 edition of
Gotische Grammatik,
as suggested in a review of the 1880 edition by
Hermann Collitz,
to replace the digraph
hv which was formerly used to express the phoneme, e.g. by Migne (vol. 18) in the 1860s. It is used, for example, in Dania transcription. It was also used to represent the voiceless labial–velar fricative in a 1921 edition of the International Phonetic Alphabet.
Related letters and other similar characters
-
: IPA letter bilabial click
-
Ԋ ԋ : Komi Nje, a letter in the Molodtsov alphabet
-
Ꙩ ꙩ : Monocular O
-
ん : N (kana)
-
Խ խ : Armenian Khe
Character encodings
|
| |
| LATIN SMALL LETTER HV |
| hexadecimal |
| 0195 |
| C6 95 |
| ƕ |
Note that the Unicode names of the Latin letters are different: "Hwair" and "Hv".
See also
-
Phonological history of wh
-
Wh (digraph)
