Hwair
Hwair (also Template:Lang, Template:Lang, Template:Lang) is the name of Template:Script, the Gothic letter expressing the Template:IPAblink or Template:IPAblink sound (reflected in English by the inverted wh-spelling for Template:IPAblink). Hwair is also the name of the Latin ligature Template:Lang (capital Template:Lang) 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 Template:Lang was probably "cauldron, pot"<ref>Cognate with Sanskrit Template:IAST "pot"); see e.g. Karl Ljungstedt, Anmärkningar till det starka preteritum i germanska språk (1887), p. 165, Hans Jensen, Die Schrift in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart (1935), p. 38, Kratylos vol. 1-2, 1956, p. 175.</ref> (cf. Template:Lang "skull");<ref>Mark 15:22 Template:Lang = Template:Lang "Golgatha".</ref> comparative reconstruction shows Template:Lang ("a kind of dish or pot") 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 (but see Qairþra).
Sound
Gothic Template:Lang is the reflex of Common Germanic Template:Lang, which in turn continues the Indo-European labiovelar Template:Lang 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, Template:Not a typo, which was introduced by Wilhelm Braune in the 1882 edition of Template:Lang,<ref>Template:Cite work</ref> as suggested in a review of the 1880 edition by Hermann Collitz,<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> to replace the digraph hv which was formerly used to express the phoneme, e.g. by Migne (vol. 18) in the 1860s. It is used, for example, in Dania transcription. It was also used to represent the voiceless labial–velar fricative Template:IPAblink in a 1921 edition of the International Phonetic Alphabet.
Related letters and other similar characters
- Template:IPA : IPA letter bilabial click
- Ԋ ԋ : Komi Nje, a letter in the Molodtsov alphabet
- Ꙩ ꙩ : Cyrillic letter monocular O
- ん : N (kana)
- Խ խ : Armenian Khe
Character encodings
| character | Template:Script | Template:Not a typo | Template:Not a typo | |||
| Unicode name | GOTHIC LETTER HWAIR | LATIN CAPITAL LETTER HWAIR | LATIN SMALL LETTER HV | |||
| character encoding | decimal | hexadecimal | decimal | hexadecimal | decimal | hexadecimal |
| Unicode | 66376 | 10348 | 502 | 01F6 | 405 | 0195 |
| UTF-8 | 240 144 141 136 | F0 90 8D 88 | 199 182 | C7 B6 | 198 149 | C6 95 |
| Numeric character reference | 𐍈 | 𐍈 | Ƕ | Ƕ | ƕ | ƕ |
Note that the Unicode names of the Latin letters are different: "Hwair" and "Hv".<ref name=Unicode>Template:Cite web</ref>