Hwair


Hwair is the name of, the Gothic letter expressing the or sound. Hwair is also the name of the Latin ligature ƕ used to transcribe Gothic.

Name

The name of the Gothic letter is recorded by Alcuin in Codex Vindobonensis 795 as uuaer. The meaning of the name ƕair was probably "cauldron, pot"
; comparative reconstruction shows *kʷer- in Proto-Indo-European.
There was no Elder Futhark rune for the phoneme, so that unlike those of most Gothic letters, the name does not continue the name of a rune.

Sound

Gothic ƕ is the reflex of Common Germanic xʷ, which in turn continues the Indo-European labiovelar * after it underwent Grimm's law. The same phoneme in Old English and Old High German is spelled hw.

Transliteration

The Gothic letter is transliterated with the Latin ligature of the same name, ƕ, which was introduced by philologists around 1900 to replace the digraph hv, which was formerly used to express the phoneme, e.g. by Migne in the 1860s. It is used for example in Dania transcription.

Related letters and other similar characters

Note that the Unicode names of the Latin letters are different: "Hwair" and "Hv".