Ayin

''Ayin'' (also ''ayn'' or ''ain''; transliterated ) is the sixteenth letter of the Semitic scripts, including Phoenician ''ʿayin'' 𐤏, Hebrew ''ʿayin'' , Aramaic ''ʿē'' 𐡏, Syriac ''ʿē'' ܥ, and Arabic ''ʿayn'' (where it is sixteenth in abjadi order only). It is related to the Ancient North Arabian 𐪒‎‎, South Arabian , and Ge'ez .

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.

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

Origins

The letter name is derived from Proto-Semitic "eye", and the Phoenician letter had the shape of a circle or oval, clearly representing an eye, perhaps ultimately (via Proto-Sinaitic) derived from the ''ı͗r'' hieroglyph ( Gardiner D4).

Arabic ʿayn

The Arabic letter is the eighteenth letter of the alphabet. It is written in one of several ways depending on its position in the word:

Pronunciation

Arabic ʿayn is one of the most common letters in Arabic. Depending on the region, it ranges from a pharyngeal to an epiglottal . It is voiced, its voiceless counterpart being . Due to its position as the innermost letter to emerge from the throat, al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi, who wrote the first Arabic dictionary, actually started writing his '' Kitab al-'Ayn'' ('The Book of ʿAyn') with as the first letter instead of the eighteenth; he viewed its origins deep down in the throat as a sign that it was the first sound, the essential sound, the voice and a representation of the self.

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 .

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 and are also used.

It is typically represented with a 3 in the Arabic chat alphabet.

In languages such as Kazakh and Kyrgyz, it represents .

Southeast Asian ''nga''

In some languages of Southeast Asia, the letter ''nga'' is used. The letter is derived from the letter ''ʿayn'', which latter is derived from the letter '' ghayn'', and it is thus written as:

This letter, derived from (), is used to represent in:
* the Jawi script, for
** Acehnese
** Banjarese
** Kerinci
** Maguindanaon
** Malay
** Minangkabau
** Tausūg
**Ternate
* the Pegon script, for
** Javanese
** Sundanese
* Arabic Afrikaans, for Afrikaans historically, called ''ngīn'' ()

Wolof ''ngōn''

In the Wolofal alphabet, for writing Wolof in Arabic script, the letter ''ngōn'' is used, and it is thus written as:

This letter also derived from the letter ''ʿayn'', which latter is derived from the letter '' ghayn''. This leter is to represent in the Wolof language, a Niger-Congo language.

Tamil ''nga''

This letter also derived from the letter ''ʿayn'', which latter is derived from the letter '' ghayn'', with three dots inside the descender, to represent in the Arwi script used for Tamil.

Related characters

For the related characters, see ''ng'' (Arabic letter) and '' ghayn''.

Hebrew ayin

Hebrew spelling:

Phonetic representation

ʿayin has traditionally been described as a voiced pharyngeal fricative (). However, this may be imprecise. Although a pharyngeal fricative has occasionally been observed for ʿayin in Arabic and so may occur in Hebrew as well, the sound is more commonly epiglottal (),Ladefoged, Peter & Ian Maddieson (1996). ''The sounds of the world's languages''. Oxford: Blackwells. and may also be a pharyngealized glottal stop ().

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).

Significance

In gematria, ʿayin represents the number 70.

ʿayin is also one of the seven letters which receive special crowns (called '' tagin'') when written in a sefer Torah.

Syriac e

Transliteration

In Semitic philology, there is a long-standing tradition of rendering Semitic ayin with the Greek rough breathing mark (e.g. Arabs).
Depending on typography, this could look similar to either an articulate single opening quotation mark (e.g. ).
or as a raised semi-circle open to the right (e.g. ).

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.
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 , Arab , Saudi , etc.;
Afula , Arad , etc.

Unicode

In Unicode, the recommended character for the transliteration of ayin is (a character in the Spacing Modifier Letters range, even though it is here not used as a modifier letter but as a full grapheme). This convention has been adopted by ISO 233-2 (1993) for Arabic and ISO 259-2 (1994) for Hebrew.

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''.
The Unicode Standard Version 7.0: chapter 7.1 "Latin", p. 294

* , the character used to represent Greek rough breathing,
* ,
* ,
* ,
* , from its use as single opening quotation mark in ASCII environments, used for ayin in ArabTeX.

Letters used to represent ayin:
* a superscript "c" (),
* the IPA symbol for pharyngealization ( or ) or ^ʕ, a superscript , the IPA symbol for voiced pharyngeal fricative,

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 .

Character encodings

See also

* Transliteration of Ancient Egyptian
* Ng (Arabic letter)
* Ghayn
* Gaf
* Għ
* Cyrillic Ghayn, used for several Central Asian languages

Notes

References

External links

*

{{Northwest Semitic abjad

Phoenician alphabet
Arabic letters
Hebrew letters
Urdu letters