Ƕair

Hwair

Hwair

Gothic letter of the alphabet

Hwair (also ƕair, huuair, hvair) is the name of 𐍈, the Gothic letter expressing the [hʷ] or [ʍ] sound (reflected in English by the inverted wh-spelling for [ʍ]). Hwair is also the name of the Latin ligature ƕ (capital Ƕ) used to transcribe Gothic.

Form of the Gothic letter
Some words with Hwair, in Joseph Wright's Grammar of the Gothic Language (1910)

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"[1] (cf. ƕairnei "skull");[2] 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, ƕ, which was introduced by philologists around 1900 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.

Character encodings

character𐍈Ƕƕ
Unicode nameGOTHIC LETTER HWAIRLATIN CAPITAL LETTER HWAIRLATIN SMALL LETTER HV
character encodingdecimalhexadecimaldecimalhexadecimaldecimalhexadecimal
Unicode663761034850201F64050195
UTF-8240 144 141 136F0 90 8D 88199 182C7 B6198 149C6 95
Numeric character reference𐍈𐍈ǶǶƕƕ

Note that the Unicode names of the Latin letters are different: "Hwair" and "Hv".[3]

See also

References

  1. [1]
    cognate with Sanskrit caru "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.
  2. [2]
    Mark 15:22 ƕairneins staþs = κρανιου τοπος "Golgatha".
  3. [3]
    "Latin Extended-B: Range: 0180–024F" (PDF). The Unicode Standard, Version 6.0. Unicode Inc. 2010. pp. 21, 18. Retrieved 2011-10-15.
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