Ayin

Ayin (also ayn or ain; transliterated ʿ) is the sixteenth letter of the Semitic scripts, including Phoenician ʿayin , Hebrew ʿayin ע, Aramaic ʿē , Syriac ʿē ܥ, and Arabic ʿayn ع (where it is sixteenth in abjadi order only).[note 1]

Ayin
PhoenicianAyin
Hebrew
ע
AramaicAyin
Syriac
ܥ
Arabic
ع
Phonemic representationʕ
Position in alphabet16
Numerical value70 (no numeric value in Maltese)
Alphabetic derivatives of the Phoenician
GreekΟ, Ω
LatinO
CyrillicО, Ѡ, Ѿ, , Ю, Ъ?, Ь?, Ы?, Ѫ?

The letter represents a voiced pharyngeal fricative (/ʕ/) 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 (thus, in the revived Modern Hebrew it is reduced to a glottal stop or is omitted entirely in part due to European influence).

The Phoenician letter is the origin of the Greek, Latin and Cyrillic letter O, O and O.

It is the origin of letter Ƹ.


Share this article:

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article Ayin, and is written by contributors. Text is available under a CC BY-SA 4.0 International License; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.