He (letter)

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He is the fifth letter of many Semitic alphabets, including Phoenician , Aramaic, Hebrew , Syriac ܗ and Arabic ه. Its sound value is 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 glottal and pharyngeal . In the Wadi el-Hol script, these appear to be expressed by derivatives of V28 "thread", A28 hillul "jubilation", compare South Arabian , , , Ge'ez ሀ, ሐ, ኀ, and O6 "court". In the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, and are merged into Heth "fence", while is replaced by He "window".

Hebrew Hei

Orthographic variants
Various Print Fonts			Cursive Hebrew	Rashi Script
Serif	Sans-serif	Monospaced
ה	ה	ה

Pronunciation

In modern Hebrew, the letter represents a voiceless glottal fricative. /h/ may also be dropped, although this pronunciation is seen as substandard.

Also, in many variant Hebrew pronunciations the letter may represent a glottal stop. In word-final position, He is used to indicate an a-vowel, usually that of qamatz (ָ ), and in this sense functions like Aleph, Vav and Yud as a mater lectionis, indicating the presence of a long vowel.

Hei, along with Aleph, Ayin, Resh, and Heth, cannot receive a dagesh. Nonetheless, it does receive a marking identical to the dagesh, to form Hei-mappiq (הּ). Although indistinguishable for most modern speakers or readers of Hebrew, the mapiq is placed in a word-final Hei to indicate that the letter is not merely a mater lectionis, but that the consonant should be aspirated in that position. It is generally used in Hebrew to indicate the third-person feminine singular genitive marker. Today such a pronunciation only occurs in religious contexts, and then often only by careful readers of the scriptures.

Significance of Hei

In gematria, Hei 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, Hei 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.)

Hei, being five in gematria, is often found on amulets, symbolizing the five fingers of a hand, a very common talismanic symbol.

In Judaism

Hei 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 Hei with an apostrophe: 'ה.

At the seder, during Yachatz there is a tradition to break the matzah into the shape of the letter Hei.

Arabic hāʼ

The letter is named hāʼ, and is written is several ways depending in its position in the word:

Hāʼ is used as a suffix (with the harakat dictated by I`rab) indicating possession, specifically indicating that the noun marked with the suffix belongs to a specific masculine possessor; for example, كتاب kitāb ("book") becomes كتابه kitābihi ("his book") with the addition of final hāʼ; the possessor is implied in the suffix. A longer example, هو يقراء كتابه, (huwa yaqraʼ kitābuhu, "he reads his book") more clearly indicates the possessor.

The feminine form of this construction is ـها -hā.

Syriac He

In the Syriac alphabet, the fifth letter is ܗ — He (ܗܐ). It is pronounced as a [h]. At the end of a word with a point above it, it represents the third-person feminine singular suffix. Without the point, it stands for the masculine equivalent. Standing alone with a horizontal line above it, it is the abbreviation for either hānau (ܗܢܘ), meaning 'this is' or 'that is', or halelûya (ܗܠܠܘܝܐ). As a numeral, He represents the number five.

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Last updated on Tuesday March 04, 2008 at 08:59:57 PST (GMT -0800)
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