Hwair (also , , ) is the name of , the Gothic letter expressing the or sound (reflected in English by the inverted '' wh''-spelling for ). Hwair is also the name of the Latin ligature (capital ) used to transcribe Gothic.

Name

The name of the Gothic letter is recorded by

Alcuin Alcuin of York (; ; 735 – 19 May 804), also called Ealhwine, Alhwin, or Alchoin, was a scholar, clergyman, poet, and teacher from York, Northumbria. He was born around 735 and became the student of Ecgbert of York, Archbishop Ecgbert at Yor ...

in Codex Vindobonensis 795 as ''uuaer''. The meaning of the name was probably "cauldron, pot" (cf. ' "skull"); comparative reconstruction shows ("a kind of dish or pot") in Proto-Indo-European. There was no

Elder Futhark The Elder Futhark (or Fuþark, ), also known as the Older Futhark, Old Futhark, or Germanic Futhark, is the oldest form of the runic alphabets. It was a writing system used by Germanic peoples for Northwest Germanic dialects in the Migration Per ...

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 ' is the reflex of

Common Germanic Proto-Germanic (abbreviated PGmc; also called Common Germanic) is the reconstructed proto-language of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages. Proto-Germanic eventually developed from pre-Proto-Germanic into three Germanic bra ...

, which in turn continues the Indo-European labiovelar after it underwent

Grimm's law Grimm's law, also known as the First Germanic Consonant Shift or First Germanic Sound Shift, is a set of sound laws describing the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) stop consonants as they developed in Proto-Germanic in the first millennium BC, first d ...

. The same phoneme in

Old English Old English ( or , or ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the Early Middle Ages. It developed from the languages brought to Great Britain by Anglo-S ...

and

Old High German Old High German (OHG; ) is the earliest stage of the German language, conventionally identified as the period from around 500/750 to 1050. Rather than representing a single supra-regional form of German, Old High German encompasses the numerous ...

is spelled ''hw''.

Transliteration

The Gothic letter is transliterated with the Latin ligature of the same name, , which was introduced by

Wilhelm Braune Theodor Wilhelm Braune (20 February 1850 in Großthiemig, Province of Saxony – 10 November 1926 in Heidelberg) was a German philologist and Germanist. Biography In 1869 Braune entered the University of Leipzig, where he was approved as an ins ...

in the 1882 edition of ', as suggested in a review of the 1880 edition by Hermann Collitz, 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. It was also used to represent the voiceless labial–velar fricative in a 1921 edition of the

International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standard written representation ...

Related letters and other similar characters

* : IPA letter bilabial click *Ԋ ԋ : Komi Nje, a letter in the

Molodtsov alphabet The Komi language, a Uralic languages, Uralic language spoken in the north-eastern part of European Russia, has been written in several different alphabets. Currently, Komi writing uses letters from the Cyrillic script. There have been five distinc ...

*Ꙩ ꙩ : Cyrillic letter monocular O *ん :

N (kana) ん, in hiragana or ン in katakana, is one of the Japanese kana, which each represent one Mora (linguistics), mora. ん is the only kana that does not end in a vowel sound (although in certain cases the vowel ending of kana, such as す, is unp ...

*Խ խ : Armenian Khe

Character encodings

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

References