Hwair Explained

Hwair (also,,) is the name of, the Gothic letter expressing the pronounced as /link/ or pronounced as /link/ sound (reflected in English by the inverted wh-spelling for pronounced as /link/). Hwair is also the name of the Latin ligature Gothic: ƕ (capital Gothic: 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 Gothic: ƕair was probably "cauldron, pot"^[1] (cf. Gothic: ƕairnei "skull");^[2] comparative reconstruction shows *kʷer- (“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 Gothic: ƕ is the reflex of Common Germanic Germanic languages: 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,, which was introduced by Wilhelm Braune in the 1882 edition of German: Gotische Grammatik^[3], as suggested in a review of the 1880 edition by Hermann Collitz^[4], 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 pronounced as /link/ in a 1921 edition of the International Phonetic Alphabet.

Related letters and other similar characters

pronounced as /ʘ/ : 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

align=right	character
align=right	Unicode name	GOTHIC LETTER HWAIR		LATIN CAPITAL LETTER HWAIR		LATIN SMALL LETTER HV
align=left	character encoding	decimal	hexadecimal	decimal	hexadecimal	decimal	hexadecimal
align=left		66376	10348	502	01F6	405	0195
align=left		240 144 141 136	F0 90 8D 88	199 182	C7 B6	198 149	C6 95
align=left		𐍈	𐍈	Ƕ	Ƕ	ƕ	ƕ

Note that the Unicode names of the Latin letters are different: "Hwair" and "Hv".^[5]

Notes and References

cognate with Sanskrit "pot"); see e.g. Karl Ljungstedt, Anmärkningar till det starka preteritum i germanska språk (1887), p. 165. Hans Jensen, 00Die Schrift in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart, 1935, p. 38 Kratylos vol. 1-2, 1956, p. 175.
[Gospel of Mark|Mark]
de. Wilhelm. Braune. Gotische Grammatik, mit einigen Lesestückchen und Worterverzeichnis. 1882. vi-vii.
de. Hermann. Collitz. W. Braune, Gotische Grammatik. Mit einigen Lesestückeu und Wortverzeichnis. (Sammlung kurzer Grammatiken germanischer Dialekte, I.) Halle, Niemeyer, 1880. VII und 118 s. 8. M. 2. Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie. 12. 1881. 480-482.
Web site: Latin Extended-B: Range: 0180–024F . The Unicode Standard, Version 6.0 . 2010 . Unicode Inc . 2011-10-15 . 21, 18.