Waw (Hebrew)
Waw ( ו) is the sixth letter of the Hebrew alphabet . It has the numerical value 6. The closest related letter in the Latin alphabet is the " W ".
Waw as Mater Lectionis
Along with iodine, aleph and he, the waw is one of the consonants that can also be used as vowel symbols. If the vav receives a point above it ( choläm ) it is mater lectionis for long O and to speak likewise. If a point is placed in the middle ( Schuruq ), it is mater lectionis for long U.
history
The Hebrew letter Waw has the same historical background as the Phoenician letter Waw , which goes back to the pictorial representation of a forked hook. Later not used - - greek letter from Waw the forwards Digamma ago and this detour also the Greek Ypsilon and the Latin letters F , U , V , W and Y .
The historical pronunciation of the letter is probably close to the English w. In today's Israeli pronunciation, which is influenced by Ashkenazi , the Waw is pronounced more like English v (and German w).
A waw at the beginning of a word is very often a prefix with the meaning "and". In ancient Hebrew it appears regularly in verbs in the narrative and AK-Consecutive at the beginning of a word, but can also appear in other words or names and on the first word in a sentence.
Examples
- ורד (vered): Rose
- רות (rut): Rut
- יונה (iona): Jonah
Character encoding
| Unicode codepoint | U + 05D5 |
| Unicode name | HEBREW LETTER VAV |
| HTML | & # 1493; |
| ISO 8859-8 | 0xE5 |
