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Zayin

Seventh letter of many Semitic alphabets

Note

the Semitic letter

Zayin (also spelled zain or zayn or simply zay) is the seventh letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician zayn 𐤆, Hebrew zayīn , Aramaic zain 𐡆, Syriac zayn ܙ, and Arabic zāy . It represents the sound . It is also related to the Ancient North Arabian 𐪘‎‎, South Arabian 𐩸, and Ge'ez ዘ.‌ The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek zeta (Ζ), Etruscan z [[File:EtruscanZ-01.png|class=skin-invert-image|14px|Z]], Latin Z, and Cyrillic Ze З, as well as Ж.

Origin

The Proto-Sinaitic glyph may have been called mis, may not have been based on a hieroglyph, and may have depicted a "fetter".

An alternative view is that it is based on the "copper ingot" hieroglyph (𓈔) in the form of an axeblade, after noting that the name "zayin" has roots in Aramaic to refer to "Arms," "Armor," and "Metal used for arms."

The Phoenician letter appears to be named after a sword or other weapon. In Hebrew, he () means "weapon", the verb he () means "to arm", and the verb he () means "to arm oneself".

Arabic zāy

The similarity to ar ر is likely a function of the original Syriac forms converging to a single symbol, requiring that one of them be distinguished as a dot; a similar process occurred to ar and ar. In Maltese, the corresponding letter to ز is ż.

Variant

Main article: Že

A variant letter of ar named že is used in Persian with three dots above instead of just one dot above. The letter is used in a number of languages, such as Persian, Pashto, Kurdish, Urdu and Uyghur (see K̡ona Yezik̡).

Hebrew zayin

Orthographic variants	Various print fonts	Cursive Hebrew	Rashi script	Serif	Sans-serif	Monospaced
ז	ז	ז	[[File:Hebrew letter Zayin handwriting.svg	class=skin-invert-image	22px]]	[[File:Zayin (Rashi-script - Hebrew letter).svg	class=skin-invert-image	35px]]

In modern Hebrew, the frequency of the usage of zayin, out of all the letters, is 0.88%.

Hebrew spelling: זַיִן

In modern Hebrew, the combination (zayin followed by a geresh) is used in loanwords and foreign names to denote as in vision.

Significance

Numerical value (gematria)

Shabbat, the receiver, is the letter Zayin that has two heads – which represents both love and fear

In gematria, zayin represents the number seven, and when used at the beginning of Hebrew years it means 7000 (i.e. זתשנד in numbers would be the future date 7754).

Use in Torah scroll

Zayin, in addition to ʻayin, gimel, teth, nun, shin, and tzadi, is one of the seven letters which receive a special crown (called a tagin) when written in a Sefer Torah (Torah scroll).

Syriac zain

Zain is a consonant with the sound which is a voiced alveolar fricative.

Character encodings

|05D6|name1=Hebrew Letter Zayin |0632|name2=Arabic Letter Zain |0719|name3=Syriac Letter Zain |0806|name4=Samaritan Letter Zen

|10387|name1=Ugaritic Letter Zeta |10846|name2=Imperial Aramaic Letter Zayin |10906|name3=Phoenician Letter Zai

References

(2014). "The origin of the alphabet: an examination of the Goldwasser hypothesis". Antiguo Oriente.
Cross, F. M. (1980) Newly Found Inscriptions in Old Canaanite and Early Phoenician Scripts. Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 238, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.2307/1356511 {{Webarchive. link. (2019-07-15)
"Gematria Chart".

Info: Wikipedia Source

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