Product Code Database
Ayin (also ayn or ain; transliterated ) is the sixteenth letter of the Semitic scripts, including Phoenician ʿayin 𐤏, Hebrew alphabet ʿayin , Aramaic alphabet ʿē 𐡏, Syriac alphabet ʿē ܥ, and Arabic alphabet ʿayn (where it is sixteenth in Abjad numerals only). It is related to the Ancient North Arabian 𐪒, South Arabian 𐩲, and Ge'ez ዐ.
The letter represents a voiced pharyngeal fricative () or a similarly articulated consonant. In some Semitic languages and dialects, the phonetic value of the letter has changed, or the phoneme has been lost altogether. In the revived Modern Hebrew it is reduced to a glottal stop or is omitted entirely, in part due to Ashkenazi European influence and their difficulty in pronouncing the consonant.
The Phoenician letter is the origin of the Greek, Latin and Cyrillic letters Omicron, O and O. It is also the origin of the Armenian letters Ո and Օ.
The Arabic character is the origin of the Latin-script letter Ƹ.
As in Hebrew, the letter originally stood for two sounds, and voiced uvular fricative . When pointing was developed, was distinguished with a dot on top غ.
In Maltese, which is written with the Latin alphabet, the digraph għ, called għajn, is used to write what was originally the same sound.
Because the sound is difficult for many non-native speakers to pronounce, it is often used as a shibboleth by native Arabic speakers; other sounds, such as ح and ض are also used.
It is typically represented with a 3 in the Arabic chat alphabet.
In languages such as Kazakh language and Kyrgyz language, it represents .
This letter, derived from (), is used to represent in:
5th printing, 2006. for
This letter is also derived from the letter ʿayn, via the derived letter ghayn. It represents .
| +Orthography variants | ||||
| ע | ע | ע |
Hebrew spelling:
In some historical Sephardi and Ashkenazi pronunciations, ʿayin represented a velar nasal (). Remnants can be found in the Yiddish pronunciations of some words such as /ˈjaŋkəv/ and /ˈmansə/ from Hebrew ( yaʿăqōḇ, "Jacob") and ( maʿăse, "story"), but in other cases, the nasal has disappeared and been replaced by /j/, such as /ˈmajsə/ and /ˈmajrəv/ from Hebrew and ( maʿărāḇ, "west"). In Israeli Hebrew (except for Mizrahi pronunciations), it represents a glottal stop in certain cases but is usually silent (it behaves the same as aleph). However, changes in adjoining vowels often testify to the former presence of a pharyngeal or epiglottal articulation. Additionally, it may be used as a shibboleth to identify the ethnolinguistic background of a Hebrew-speaker, as most Israeli Arab and some of Israel's Mizrahi Jews (mainly Yemenite Jews) use the more traditional pronunciation, while other Hebrew-speakers pronounce it similar to Aleph.
Ayin is also one of the three letters that can take a furtive patach (patach ganuv). In Hebrew loanwords in Greek and Latin, ʿayin is sometimes reflected as /g/, since the biblical phonemes /ʕ/ (or "ʿ") and /ʁ/ (represented by "g") were both represented in Hebrew writing by the letter ʿayin (see Ġain). Gomorrah is from the original /ʁamora/ (modern ʿAmora) and Gaza from the original /ʁazza/ (ʿaza) (cf. Arabic غزة Ġazzah, IPA: ˈɣazza.) In Yiddish, the ʿayin is used to write the vowel e when it is not part of the diphthong ey.
ʿayin is also one of the seven letters which receive special crowns (called tagin) when written in a sefer Torah.
This is by analogy to the transliteration of alef (glottal stop, hamza) by the Greek smooth breathing mark , rendered as single closing quotation mark or as raised semi-circle open to the left. This convention has been adopted by DIN in 1982 and by ISO in 1984 for Arabic (DIN 31635, ISO 233) and Hebrew (DIN 31636, ISO 259).
The shape of the "raised semi-circle" for ayin and alef was adopted by the Encyclopedia of Islam (edited 1913–1938, 1954–2005, and from 2007), and from there by the International Journal of Middle East Studies. This convention has since also been followed by ISO (ISO 233-2 and ISO 259-2, 1993/4) and by DIN in 1982. A notable exception remains, ALA-LC (1991), the system used by the Library of Congress, continues to recommend modifier letter turned comma (for Hebrew) or left single quotation mark (for Arabic).
The symbols for the corresponding phonemes in the International Phonetic Alphabet, for pharyngeal fricative (ayin) and for glottal stop (alef) were adopted in the 1928 revision.
In anglicized Arabic or Hebrew names or in loanwords, ayin is often omitted entirely: Iraq rtl=yes, Arab rtl=yes, Saudi rtl=yes , etc.; Afula rtl=yes, Arad rtl=yes, etc.
Maltese, which uses a Latin alphabet, the only Semitic language to do so in its standard form, writes the ayin as ⟨għ⟩. It is usually unvocalized in speech. The Somali Latin alphabet and Cypriot Arabic alphabet represents the ayin with the letter ⟨c⟩. The informal way to represent it in Arabic chat alphabet uses the digit ⟨3⟩ as transliteration.
There are a number of alternative Unicode characters in use, some of which are easily confused or even considered equivalent in practice:"Various small, raised hook- or comma-shaped characters are often substituted for a glottal stop—for instance, , , , or . U+02BB, in particular, is used in Hawaiian orthography as the ʻokina."
target="_blank" rel="nofollow"> The Unicode Standard Version 7.0: chapter 7.1 "Latin", p. 294.
Letters used to represent ayin:
The phonemes corresponding to alef and ayin in Ancient Egyptian are by convention transliterated by more distinctive signs: Egyptian alef is rendered by two semi-circles open to the left, stacked vertically, and Egyptian ayin is rendered by a single full-width semi-circle open to the right. These characters were introduced in Unicode in version 5.1 (2008, Latin Extended-D range), and .
|
|
