ayin

 

ʿÁyin
Arabic	Syriac	Hebrew	Aramaic	Phoenician
ﻋ,ﻉ	ܥ	ע
Phonemic representation (IPA):				ʕ
Position in alphabet:				16
Gematria/Abjad value:				70

ʿÁyin or Ayin is the sixteenth letter in many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew ע and Arabic ʿayn ع (in abjadi order). It originally represented a voiced pharyngeal fricative (IPA /ʕ/).

It is usually transliterated into the Latin alphabet with ʿ, a symbol based on the Greek spiritus asper ʽ, for example in the name of the letter itself, ʿayin. The grave accent ` is sometimes used as a substitute.

History

ı͗r "eye" in hieroglyphs

The letter name is derived from West Semitic ʿen "eye", and the Proto-Canaanite letter had an eye-shape, ultimately derived from the ı͗r hieroglyph To this day, 'ayin in Hebrew and Arabic means "eye".

The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek Omicron (Ο), and hence the Latin O, and the equivalent in the Cyrillic alphabet, all representing vowels.

Transliteration

ˁ in hieroglyphs

Semitic romanization, and similarly the Egyptologist transliteration of "Egyptian ayin" phoneme for the transliteration of ayin uses a character based on Greek spiritus asper, similar in shape to superscript ^c. This character has not been encoded by Unicode (as of version 5.0), and it is common practice to use a superscript semicircle ("combining half ring" ʿ) or the IPA "pharyngeal" symbol (ˁ) in its place.

Less precise transcriptions may use an apostrophe, failing to distinguish the ayin from the glottal stop consonant, Hamza. Even this representation is often omitted, as these symbols are often misinterpreted as punctuation instead of actual consonants. The Somali language represents the ayin with the ordinary Roman letter c.

Arabic ʿayn

Arabic alphabet
ﺍ    ﺏ    ﺕ    ﺙ    ﺝ    ﺡ
ﺥ    ﺩ    ﺫ    ﺭ    ﺯ     س
ﺵ    ﺹ    ﺽ    ﻁ    ﻅ    ﻉ
ﻍ    ﻑ    ﻕ    ﻙ    ﻝ
ﻡ    ﻥ    ه‍    ﻭ    ﻱ
History · Transliteration Diacritics · Hamza ء Numerals · Numeration

The Arabic ʿayn is written is several ways depending in its position in the word:

glyph
stand alone	at the beginning	in the middle	at the end
ع	عـ	ـعـ	ـع

Pronunciation

ʿAyn is one of the most notoriously difficult letters for Western learners to pronounce. The sound is somewhat like a combination of an ḥa' and long "aaah" sound, while clenching the muscles at the back of the throat, as in the gagging reflex. The produced sound has been described as somewhat like the bleating of a goat. To Western listeners, the letter sounds something like an "Aah" with slightly raised intonation. Unfortunately, ayin is one of the most common letters in Arabic, presenting a significant barrier to western learners attempting to learn the language. One piece of advice for people trying to make the ayin sound is to "sing the lowest possible note, then one lower".

Because the sound is so difficult for most non-Arabs to pronounce, it is often used as a shibboleth by Arabic-speakers; other sounds, such as Ḥa and Ḍād are also used, typically with speakers of other Semitic languages (most Hebrew-speakers hould be able to pronounce ʿayn, and Mizrahi Jews and speakers of the Ethiopic languages can typically pronounce Ḥa, but Ḍad appears to be unique to Arabic).

There is a theory that ayin was the pronunciation of the Proto-Indo-European h₃ laryngeal.

Hebrew Ayin

Hebrew alphabet
א    ב    ג    ד    ה    ו
ז    ח    ט    י    כך
ל    מם    נן    ס    ע    פף
צץ    ק    ר    ש    ת
History · Transliteration Niqqud · Dagesh · Gematria Cantillation · Numeration

Syriac alphabet
	ܐ	ܒ	ܓ	ܕ
ܗ	ܘ	ܙ	ܚ	ܛ	ܝ
ܟܟ	ܠ	ܡܡ	ܢܢ	ܣ	ܥ
ܦ	ܨ	ܩ	ܪ	ܫ	ܬ

Ayin, along with Aleph, Resh, He, and Heth, cannot receive a dagesh.

Phonemic representation

Ayin traditionally represents a voiced pharyngeal fricative that has no equivalent in the English language ([ʕ]).

In some historical Sephardi pronunciations, `Ayin represented a velar nasal "ng" consonant sound, while in non-"Mizrahi" modern Israeli Hebrew represents a glottal stop in certain cases, but is mostly silent (i.e. it is given the same treatment as Aleph). However, certain changes in adjoining vowels often testify to the former presence of the glottal stop, even if it is no longer pronounced. In Arabic, Ghayin is written the same way as Ayin, but with a dot to distinguish it.

In Yiddish, the ‘Áyin is used as a vowel, rather than a consonant, and represents /e/.

Ayin is also one of the three letters that can take a vowel at the end of a word, and the vowel it takes is chataf patach.

Transliteration

In Hebrew transliteration, the letter Ayin can be transliterated as `. In Greek and Latin it was sometimes represented as g, since the biblical phonemes /ʕ/ (or "`") and /ʁ/ (represented by "g") were both represented in Hebrew writing by the letter Ayin, just as they later merged in pronunciation to /ʕ/ and therefore are pronounced identically (as /ʕ/ or /ʔ/ or not pronounced at all) in all modern varieties of Hebrew (see Ġayn). Because of this, we get Gomorrah from the original /ʁamora/ (`Amora) and Gaza from the original /ʁazza/ (`Aza), which eventually gave us the English word gauze.

Significance

In gematria, ayin represents the number 70.

Ayin is also one of the seven letters which receive a special crown (called a tagin) when written in a Sefer Torah. See Shin, Gimmel, Teth, Nun, Zayin, and Tzadi.

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