He (letter)
Encyclopedia : H : HE : HEL : He (letter)
| Hē | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Arabic | Syriac | Hebrew | Aramaic | Phoenician |
| هـ | ܗ | ה |
| 
|
| Pronunciation (IPA): | ||||
| Position in alphabet: | 5 | |||
| Gematria/Abjad value: | 5 | |||
He is the fifth letter of many Semitic alphabets, including Phoenician 
, Aramaic, Hebrew ה, Syriac ܗ and Arabic hāʼ ﻩ, expressing a voiceless glottal fricative ([h]).
The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek Epsilon, Etruscan 
𐌄, Latin E and Cyrillic Ye. He, like all Phoenician letters, represented a consonant, but the Latin, Greek and Cyrillic equivalents have all come to represent vowel sounds.
Origins
In Proto-West Semitic there were still three voiceless fricatives, uvular ḫ glottal h and pharyngeal ḥ. In the Wadi el-Hol script, these appear to be expressed by derivatives of
h, 
ḥ, 
ḫ, Ge'ez ሀ, ሐ, ኀ, and He in Hebrew:
| 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 | |||||
| The Arabic alphabet | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| History · Transliteration Diacritics · hamza {{ar Numerals · Numeration | ||||||
| Syriac alphabet | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aleph (letter)>ܐ | Beth (letter)>ܒ | Gimel (letter)>ܓ | Dalet>ܕ | ||
| He (letter)>ܗ | Waw (letter)>ܘ | Zayin>ܙ | Heth (letter)>ܚ | Teth>ܛ | Yodh>ܝ |
| Kaph>ܟܟ | Lamedh>ܠ | Mem>ܡܡ | Nun (letter)>ܢܢ | Samekh>ܣ | Ayin>ܥ |
| Pe (letter)>ܦ | Tsade>ܨ | Qoph>ܩ | Resh>ܪ | Shin (letter)>ܫ | Taw (letter)>ܬ |
Pronunciation:
In modern Hebrew, the letter can either be pronunced like the English letter H, (a voiceless glottal fricative), or simply as silent, a practice common among Israelis. It is often viewed as sloppy to pronounce the He as silent.Variations on written form/pronunciation:
He generally is to be pronounced as IPA /h/, like the letter h in English, but in many variant Hebrew pronunciations the letter may become a glottal stop or not be pronunced at all. In word-final position, He is used to indicate an a-vowel, usually a qamatz (ָ), and in this sense functions like Aleph, Vav and Yud as a mater lectionis, indicating the presence of a long vowel.He, along with Aleph, Ayin, Resh, and Heth, cannot receive a dagesh. Nonetheless, it does receive a marking identical to the dagesh, to form He-mappiq (הּ). Although indistinguishable for most modern speakers or readers of Hebrew, the mapiq is placed in a word-final He to indicate that the letter is not merely a mater lectionis, but that the letter should be aspirated in that position. It is generally used in Hebrew to indicate the third-person feminine singular genitive marker. Today the mapiq is only pronounced in religious contexts, and then often only by careful readers of the scriptures.
Significance of He:
In gematria, He symbolizes the number five, and when used at the beginning of Hebrew years, it means 5000 (i.e. התשנד in numbers would be the date 5754).Attached to words, He may have three possible meanings:
- A preposition meaning "the", "that", or "who" (as in "A boy who reads"). For example, yeled - a boy, Hayeled - the boy.
- A prefix indicating that the sentence is a question. (For example, Yadata - You knew, Hayadata? - Did you know?)
- A suffix after place names indicating movement towards the given noun. (For example, Yerushalayim - Jerusalem, Yerushalaymah - towards Jerusalem.)
In Judaism
He is often used to represent the name of God, as He stands for Hashem, which means The Name and is a way of saying 'God' without actually saying the name of God. In print, Hashem is usually written as He with a chupchik: 'ה.At the seder, during Yachatz there is a tradition to break the matzah into the shape of the letter He.
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.