Ayin


Ayin is the sixteenth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician ʿayin, Hebrew ʿayin , Aramaic ʿē, Syriac ʿē ܥ, and Arabic ʿayn ع.
The letter represents a voiced pharyngeal fricative or a similarly articulated consonant. In some Semitic languages and dialects, the phonetic value of the letter has changed, or the phoneme has been lost altogether.
The Phoenician letter is the origin of the Greek, Latin and Cyrillic letter O.

Origins

The letter name is derived from Proto-Semitic *ʿayn- "eye", and the Phoenician letter had the shape of a circle or oval, clearly representing an eye, perhaps ultimately derived from the ı͗r hieroglyph ?.
The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek Ο, Latin O, and Cyrillic О, all representing vowels.
The sound represented by ayin is common to much of the Afroasiatic language family, such as in the Egyptian language, the Cushitic languages and the Semitic languages.

Transliteration

In Semitic philology, there is a long-standing tradition of rendering Semitic ayin with the Greek rough breathing mark .
Depending on typography, this could look similar to either an articulate single opening quotation mark .
or as a raised semi-circle open to the right .
This is by analogy to the transliteration of alef by the Greek smooth breathing mark, rendered as single closing quotation mark or as raised semi-circle open to the left. This convention has been adopted by DIN in 1982 and by ISO in 1984 for Arabic and Hebrew.
The shape of the "raised semi-circle" for ayin and alef was adopted by the Encyclopedia of Islam, and from there by the International Journal of Middle East Studies.
This convention has since also been followed by ISO and by DIN.
A notable exception remains, ALA-LC, the system used by the Library of Congress, continues to recommend modifier letter turned comma or left single quotation mark.
The symbols for the corresponding phonemes in the International Phonetic Alphabet, for pharyngeal fricative and for glottal stop were adopted in the 1928 revision.
In anglicized Arabic or Hebrew names or in loanwords, ayin is often omitted entirely: Iraq ʿirāq عراق, Arab ʿarab عرب, Saudi suʿūdī سعودي, etc.;
Afula עֲפוּלָה, Arad עֲרָד, etc.
In Arabic, the presence of ayin in front of u can sometimes be inferred even if it is not rendered separately, as the vowel quality is shifted towards o
Maltese, which uses a Latin alphabet, the only Semitic language to do so in its standard form, writes the ayin as. It is usually unvocalized in speech.
The Somali Latin alphabet represents the ʿayin with the letter.
The informal way to represent it in Arabic chat alphabet uses the digit as transliteration.

Unicode

In Unicode, the recommended character for the transliteration of ayin is ʿ "modifier letter left half ring". This convention has been adopted by ISO 233-2 for Arabic and ISO 259-2 for Hebrew.
There are a number of alternative Unicode characters in use, some of which are easily confused or even considered equivalent in practice:
Other variants chosen to represent ayin as a full grapheme :
It is worth noting that the phonemes corresponding to alef and ayin in Ancient Egyptian are by convention
transliterated by more distinctive signs: Egyptian alef is rendered by two semi-circles open to the left, stacked vertically,
and Egyptian ayin is rendered by a single full-width semi-circle open to the right. These characters were introduced in Unicode in version 5.1, ꜣ U+A723 and ꜥ U+A725.

Hebrew ayin

Hebrew spelling:
ʿayin, along with Aleph, Resh, He and Heth, cannot receive a dagesh.

Phonetic representation

ʿayin has traditionally been described as a voiced pharyngeal fricative. However, this may be imprecise. Although a pharyngeal fricative has occasionally been observed for ʿayin in Arabic and so may occur in Hebrew as well, the sound is more commonly epiglottal, and may also be a pharyngealized glottal stop.
In some historical Sephardi and Ashkenazi pronunciations, ʿayin represented a velar nasal .
Remnants can be found in the Yiddish pronunciations of some words such as /ˈjaŋkəv/ and /ˈmansə/ from Hebrew and , but in other cases, the nasal has disappeared and been replaced by /j/, such as /ˈmajsə/ and /ˈmajrəv/ from Hebrew and .
In Israeli Hebrew, it represents a glottal stop in certain cases but is usually silent. However, changes in adjoining vowels often testify to the former presence of a pharyngeal or epiglottal articulation. As well, it may be used as a shibboleth to identify the social background of a speaker, as Arabs and some of the Mizrahim use the more traditional pronunciation, while other Hebrew speakers pronounce it similar to Aleph.
Ayin is also one of the three letters that can take a furtive patach patach ganuv).
In Hebrew loanwords in Greek and Latin, ʿayin is sometimes reflected as /g/, since the biblical phonemes and were both represented in Hebrew writing by the letter ʿayin. Gomorrah is from the original and Gaza from the original
In Yiddish, the ʿayin is used to write the vowel e when it is not part of the diphthong ey.

Significance

In gematria, ʿayin represents the number 70.
ʿayin is also one of the seven letters which receive special crowns when written in a sefer Torah.
Because the sound is difficult for most non-Arabs to pronounce, it is often used as a shibboleth by Arabic speakers; other sounds, such as Ḥā and Ḍād are also used.

Arabic ʿayn

The Arabic letter ﻉ is the eighteenth letter of the alphabet. It is written in one of several ways depending on its position in the word:

Pronunciation

Arabic ʿayn is one of the most common letters in Arabic. Depending on the region, it ranges from a pharyngeal to an epiglottal. It is voiced, its unvoiced counterpart being ح. Due to its position as the innermost letter to emerge from the throat, al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi, who wrote the first Arabic dictionary, actually started writing with ʿayn as the first letter instead of the eighteenth; he viewed its origins deep down in the throat as a sign that it was the first sound, the essential sound, the voice and a representation of the self.
In the Persian language and other languages using the Persian alphabet, it is pronounced as , and rarely as in some languages.
As in Hebrew, the letter originally stood for two sounds, and. When pointing was developed, the sound was distinguished with a dot on top, to give the letter ghayn. In Maltese, which is written with the Latin alphabet, the digraph għ, called ʿajn, is used to write what was originally the same sound.

Character encodings