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 in Codex Vindobonensis 795 as uuaer. The meaning of the name was probably "cauldron, pot"Cognate with Sanskrit "pot"); see e.g. Karl Ljungstedt, Anmärkningar till det starka preteritum i germanska språk (1887), p. 165, Hans Jensen, Die Schrift in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart (1935), p. 38, Kratylos vol. 1-2, 1956, p. 175. (cf. "skull");Mark 15:22 = "Golgatha". comparative reconstruction shows ("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 is the reflex of Common Germanic , which in turn continues the Indo-European labiovelar after it underwent Grimm's law. The same phoneme in Old English and Old High German is spelled hw (Modern English wh).
Transliteration The Gothic letter is transliterated with the Latin ligature of the same name, , which was introduced by Wilhelm Braune 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.
Related letters and other similar characters : IPA letter bilabial click Ԋ ԋ : Komi Nje, a letter in the Molodtsov alphabet Ꙩ ꙩ : Cyrillic letter monocular O ん : N (kana) Խ խ : Armenian Khe
Character encodings character Unicode name GOTHIC LETTER HWAIR LATIN CAPITAL LETTER HWAIR LATIN SMALL LETTER HV character encoding decimal hexadecimal decimal hexadecimal decimal hexadecimal Unicode 66376 10348 502 01F6 405 0195 UTF-8 240 144 141 136 F0 90 8D 88 199 182 C7 B6 198 149 C6 95 Numeric character reference 𐍈 𐍈 Ƕ Ƕ ƕ ƕ Note that the Unicode names of the Latin letters are different: "Hwair" and "Hv".
See also Phonological history of wh Wh (digraph)
References