Waw (letter)

Origin

In Hebrew, the word {{linktext|וָו}} vav is used to mean both "hook" and the letter's name (the name is also written {{linktext|וי״ו}}), while in Syriac and Arabic, waw to mean "hook" has fallen out of use.

Arabic wāw{{anchor|Arabic}}

The Arabic letter و is named واو wāw and is written in several ways depending on its position in the word:

Wāw is used to represent four distinct phonetic features:

• A consonant, pronounced as a voiced labial-velar approximant , which is the case whenever it is at the beginning of a word, and sometimes elsewhere.
• A long . The preceding consonant could either have no diacritic or a short-wāw-vowel mark, damma, to aid in the pronunciation by hinting to the following long vowel.
• A long in many dialects, as a result of the monophthongization that the diphthong underwent in most of words.
• Part of the sequence . In this case it has no diacritic, but could be marked with a sukun in some traditions. The preceding consonant could either have no diacritic or have a ar sign, hinting to the first vowel in the diphthong.

As a vowel, wāw can serve as the carrier of a hamza: ؤ.

Wāw is the sole letter of the common Arabic word wa, the primary conjunction in Arabic, equivalent to "and". In writing, it is prefixed to the following word, sometimes including other conjunctions, such as وَلَكِن wa-lākin, meaning "but". Another function is the "oath", by preceding a noun of great significance to the speaker. It is often literally translatable to "By..." or "I swear to...", and is often used in the Qur'an in this way, and also in the generally fixed construction والله wallāh ("By Allah!" or "I swear to God!"). The word also appears, particularly in classical verse, in the construction known as wāw rubba, to introduce a description.

Derived letters

With an additional triple dot diacritic above waw, the letter then named ve is used to represent distinctively the consonant in Arabic-based Uyghur, Kazakh and Kyrgyz.

in Kurdish, Beja, and Kashmiri; in Arabic-based Kazakh; in Uyghur.

Thirty-fourth letter of the Azerbaijani Arabic script, represents ü .

A variant of Kurdish û وو, ۇ ; historically for Serbo-Croatian and Uzbek.

Also used in Kyrgyz for Үү /y/.

in Uyghur. Also found in Quranic Arabic as in ar "prayer" for an Old Higazi merged with , in modern spelling .

in Southern Kurdish.

in Uyghur.

In Jawi script for . Also used in Balochi for and .

Other letters

See Arabic script in Unicode

Hebrew waw/vav

Hebrew spelling: or or .

;The letter appears with or without a hook on different sans-serif fonts, for example:

• Arial, DejaVu Sans, Arimo, Open Sans: ו
• Tahoma, Alef, Heebo: ו

Pronunciation in modern Hebrew

Vav has three orthographic variants, each with a different phonemic value and phonetic realisation: orthographic_variants

In modern Hebrew, the frequency of the usage of vav, out of all the letters, is one of the highest, about 10.00%.

Vav as consonant

Consonantal vav () generally represents a voiced labiodental fricative (like the English v) in Ashkenazi, European Sephardi, Persian, Caucasian, Italian and modern Israeli Hebrew, and was originally a labial-velar approximant .

In modern Israeli Hebrew, some loanwords, the pronunciation of whose source contains , and their derivations, are pronounced with : – (but: – ).

Modern Hebrew has no standardized way to distinguish orthographically between and . The pronunciation is determined by prior knowledge or must be derived through context.

Some non standard spellings of the sound are sometimes found in modern Hebrew texts, such as word-initial double-vav: – (word-medial double-vav is both standard and common for both and , see table above) or, rarely, vav with a geresh: – .

Vav with a dot on top

Main article: Holam

Vav can be used as a mater lectionis for an o vowel, in which case it is known as a he, which in pointed text is marked as vav with a dot above it. It is pronounced (phonemically transcribed more simply as ).

The distinction is normally ignored, and the HEBREW POINT HOLAM (U+05B9) is used in all cases.

The vowel can be denoted without the vav, as just the dot placed above and to the left of the letter it points, and it is then called he. Some inadequate typefaces do not support the distinction between the he ⟨⟩ , the consonantal vav pointed with a he ⟨⟩ (compare he ⟨⟩ and consonantal vav-he ⟨⟩ ). To display a consonantal vav with he correctly, the typeface must either support the vav with the Unicode combining character "HEBREW POINT HOLAM HASER FOR VAV" (U+05BA, HTML Entity (decimal) ֺ) or the precomposed character (U+FB4B).

Compare the three:

1. The vav with the combining character HEBREW POINT HOLAM:
2. The vav with the combining character HEBREW POINT HOLAM HASER FOR VAV:
3. The precomposed character:

Vav with a dot in the middle

Main article: Shuruk

Vav can also serve as a mater lectionis for , in which case it is termed shuruk and, in text with niqqud, bears a mid-height dot to the left.

Shuruk and vav with a dagesh look identical (""), but differ with respect to the absence or presence, respectively, of an additional vowel marker. Compare, for instance, "(a) market" with "to market": in the latter, a zeire (denoting /e/) follows the pointed vav, forcing its interpretation as a geminate consonant. Both cases occur side by side in the word "marketing": the first "" is a consonantal vav with a dagesh, followed by the vowel /u/ in the visually identical form of shuruk.

Unlike other matres lectionis, shuruk can occur word-initially as an allomorph of the vav conjunctive (see below), namely in the context of a subsequent labial or a consonant followed by shva na'. Its pronunciation in this case is .

Numerical value

Vav in gematria represents the number six, and when used at the beginning of Hebrew years, it means 6000 (i.e. ותשנד in numbers would be the date 6754.)

Words written as vav

Main article: Hebrew grammar

Vav at the beginning of the word has several possible meanings:

• vav conjunctive (Vav Hachibur, literally "the Vav of Connection" — chibur means "joining", or "bringing together") connects two words or parts of a sentence; it is a grammatical conjunction meaning '' 'and'''. It comes at the start of a word, and is written וּ before ב, ו, מ, פ, or a letter with a ְ (Shva), ו with the following letter's Hataf's Niqqud before a letter with a Hataf (for example, before , before , before ), וָ sometimes before a stress and in any other case. This is the most common usage.
• vav consecutive (Vav Hahipuch, literally "the Vav of Reversal" — hipuch means "inversion"), mainly biblical, is commonly mistaken for the previous type of vav; it indicates consequence of actions and reverses the tense of the verb following it:
  • when placed in front of a verb in the imperfect tense, it changes the verb to the perfect tense. For example, yomar means 'he will say' and vayomar means 'he said';
  • when placed in front of a verb in the perfect, it changes the verb to the imperfect tense. For example, ahavtah means 'you loved', and ve'ahavtah means 'you will love'. (Note: Older Hebrew did not have "tense" in a temporal sense, "perfect," and "imperfect" instead denoting aspect of completed or continuing action. Modern Hebrew verbal tenses have developed closer to their Indo-European counterparts, mostly having a temporal quality rather than denoting aspect. As a rule, modern Hebrew does not use the "Vav Consecutive" form.)
• vav explicative

Yiddish

In Yiddish, the letter (known as vov) is used for several orthographic purposes in native words:

• Alone, a single vov ו represents the vowel in Northern Yiddish (Litvish) or in Southern Yiddish (Poylish and Galitzish).
• The digraph וו, "tsvey vovn" ('two vovs'), represents the consonant .
• The digraph וי, consisting of a vov followed by a yud, represents the diphthong [] or []. The single vov may be written with a dot on the left when necessary to avoid ambiguity and distinguish it from other functions of the letter. For example, the word vu 'where' is spelled וווּ, as tsvey vovn followed by a single vov; the single vov indicating is marked with a dot in order to distinguish which of the three vovs represents the vowel. Some texts instead separate the digraph from the single vov with a silent aleph.

Loanwords from Hebrew or Aramaic in Yiddish are spelled as they are in their language of origin.

Syriac waw

In the Syriac alphabet, the sixth letter is ܘ. Waw (ܘܐܘ) is pronounced [w]. When it is used as a mater lectionis, a waw with a dot above the letter is pronounced [o], and a waw with a dot under the letter is pronounced [u]. Waw has an alphabetic-numeral value of 6.

Character encodings

|05D5|name1=Hebrew Letter Vav |0648|name2=Arabic Letter Waw |0718|name3=Syriac Letter Waw |0805|name4=Samaritan Letter Baa |FB35|name5=Hebrew Letter Vav With Dagesh |FB4B|name6=Hebrew Letter Vav With Holam

|10386|name1=Ugaritic Letter Wo |10845|name2=Imperial Aramaic Letter Waw |10905|name3=Phoenician Letter Wau

References

References

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