O

Oo

O or o (spoken: [ ʔoː ]) is the 14th letter of the classical and the 15th letter of the modern Latin alphabet . He is a vowel . The letter O has an average frequency of 2.51% in German texts. It is the 15th most common letter in German texts and therefore the rarest vowel.

The letter O in the finger alphabet

The finger alphabet for the deaf or hard of hearing represents the letter O with the thumb forming a closed circle with the rest of the fingers.

origin


Eye (protosinaitic)	Phoenician 'Ayin	Greek omicron	Greek omega	Etruscan O	Latin O

In the Protosinaite script , the letter is the symbol for an eye. Over time the pupil changed into a line and later disappeared completely; already in the Phoenician alphabet the eye symbol became a circle. The Phoenicians gave the letter the name 'Ayin (eye). The phonetic value of the letter among the Phoenicians was the voiced pharyngeal fricative [ʕ], a consonant that does not occur in German.

The Greeks did not use this sound value either and instead adopted the 'Ayin as the letter for the vowel / o /. Originally there was only one symbol for O in Greek, which was derived directly from 'Ayin, this symbol stood for both [o] and [oː]. In the Ionian variant of the Greek script, a new letter was later introduced for [oː], which was a modification of the original O. The original O was given the name Omicron (small O) and retained its position in the alphabet, the long O sound was given the name Omega (capital O) and was inserted at the end of the Greek alphabet .

The Etruscans only adopted the original letter for O, as did the Romans. In both alphabets it retained its appearance and sound value [o].

pronunciation

In German the O is used for two sounds:

The long, closed O ( rounded semi-closed back vowel ; / o: / as in “W oh l”) and
the short, open O ( rounded, half-open back vowel ; / ɔ / as in "W o lle").

In foreign words, the closed o can also be short (“M o dell” [ o ]) and the open can also be long (“W a llstreet” [ ɔ: ]).

In other languages, the O usually stands for the same sounds or one of them. English is an exception: depending on the context and dialect, it is also pronounced as [ ɒ ] (“fox”, British), [ ɑ ] (“fox”, American) or [ ʌ ] (“son”).

Quote

"AVENTIN [...] teaches 'rotundi oris spiritu' and also ICKELSAMER [...] to pronounce 'with the breath of a round, puffed mouth'"

- Grimm's dictionary

literature

Hellmut Geißner : <o, oh> [o:]. Phonetic - prosodic - poetic. In: Of sounds and people. Festschrift for Peter Martens on his 70th birthday. Edited by Edith Slembeck. Scriptor, Frankfurt am Main 1989, ISBN 3-589-20888-0 , pp. 69-81.

Web links

Wiktionary: O - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Wiktionary: o - Explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Commons : O - album with pictures, videos and audio files