Hwair (also , , ) is the name of , the

Gothic letter Blackletter (sometimes black letter), also known as Gothic script, Gothic minuscule, or Textura, was a script used throughout Western Europe from approximately 1150 until the 17th century. It continued to be commonly used for the Danish, Norwe ...

expressing the or sound (reflected in

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ...

by the inverted '' wh''-spelling for ). Hwair is also the name of the Latin ligature (capital ) used to transcribe Gothic.

Name

The name of the Gothic letter is recorded by

Alcuin Alcuin of York (; la, Flaccus Albinus Alcuinus; 735 – 19 May 804) – also called Ealhwine, Alhwin, or Alchoin – was a scholar, clergyman, poet, and teacher from York, Northumbria. He was born around 735 and became the student o ...

Codex Vindobonensis 795 The Codex Vindobonensis 795 (Vienna Austrian National Library Codex) is a 9th-century manuscript, most likely compiled in 798 or shortly thereafter (after Arno of Salzburg returned from Rome to become archbishop). It contains letters and treatises ...

as ''uuaer''. The meaning of the name ' was probably "cauldron, pot" (cf. ' "skull");

Mark Mark may refer to: Currency * Bosnia and Herzegovina convertible mark, the currency of Bosnia and Herzegovina * East German mark, the currency of the German Democratic Republic * Estonian mark, the currency of Estonia between 1918 and 1927 * Finn ...

15:22 ' = "

Golgatha Calvary ( la, Calvariae or ) or Golgotha ( grc-gre, Γολγοθᾶ, ''Golgothâ'') was a site immediately outside Jerusalem's walls where Jesus was said to have been crucified according to the canonical Gospels. Since at least the early medi ...

". comparative reconstruction shows ''*kʷer''- (“a kind of dish or pot”) in Proto-Indo-European. There was no

Elder Futhark The Elder Futhark (or Fuþark), also known as the Older Futhark, Old Futhark, or Germanic Futhark, is the oldest form of the runic alphabets. It was a writing system used by Germanic peoples for Northwest Germanic dialects in the Migration Peri ...

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 ' is the reflex of

Common Germanic Proto-Germanic (abbreviated PGmc; also called Common Germanic) is the reconstructed proto-language of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages. Proto-Germanic eventually developed from pre-Proto-Germanic into three Germanic bra ...

', which in turn continues the Indo-European labiovelar ''*'' after it underwent

Grimm's law Grimm's law (also known as the First Germanic Sound Shift) is a set of sound laws describing the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) stop consonants as they developed in Proto-Germanic in the 1st millennium BC. First systematically put forward by Jacob Gr ...

. The same phoneme in

Old English Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the mid-5th ...

and

Old High German Old High German (OHG; german: Althochdeutsch (Ahd.)) is the earliest stage of the German language, conventionally covering the period from around 750 to 1050. There is no standardised or supra-regional form of German at this period, and Old Hig ...

is spelled ''hw''.

Transliteration

The Gothic letter is transliterated with the Latin ligature of the same name, , which was introduced by philologists around 1900 to replace the digraph ''hv'', which was formerly used to express the phoneme, e.g. by

Migne Jacques Paul Migne (; 25 October 1800 – 24 October 1875) was a French priest who published inexpensive and widely distributed editions of theological works, encyclopedias, and the texts of the Church Fathers, with the goal of providing a ...

(vol. 18) in the 1860s. It is used, for example, in

Dania transcription Dania (Latin for ''Denmark'') is the traditional linguistic transcription system used in Denmark to describe the Danish language. It was invented by Danish linguist Otto Jespersen and published in 1890 in the ''Dania, Tidsskrift for folkemål ...

Related letters and other similar characters

* : IPA letter Bilabial click *Ԋ ԋ :

Komi Nje Komi Nje (Ԋ ԋ; italics: ) is a letter of the Molodtsov alphabet, a variant of Cyrillic. It was used only in the writing of the Komi language in the 1920shttp://unicode.org/wg2/docs/n2224.pdf and in the Mordvin language. Its form is similar ...

, a letter in the Molodtsov alphabet *Ꙩ ꙩ : Cyrillic letter Monocular O *ん :

N (kana) ん, in hiragana or ン in katakana, is one of the Japanese kana, which each represent one mora. ん is the only kana that does not end in a vowel sound (although in certain cases the vowel ending of kana, such as す, is unpronounced). The ...

*Խ խ : Armenian Khe

Computing codes

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

References