He is the fifth letter of many Semitic alphabets, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew ה, Syriac ܗ and Arabic hāʾ ه. Its sound value is a voiceless glottal fricative . The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek Epsilon, Etruscan 𐌄, Latin E and Cyrillic Е. 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-Northwest Semitic there were still three voiceless fricatives: uvular ḫ, glottal h, and pharyngeal ḥ. In the Wadi el-Hol script, these appear to be expressed by derivatives of ḫayt "thread", hillul "jubilation", compare South Arabian h, ḥ, ḫ, Ge'ez ሀ, ሐ, ኀ, and ḥasir "court". In the Phoenician alphabet, ḫayt and ḥasir are merged into Heth "fence", while hillul is replaced by He "window". Hebrew He Hebrew spelling: הֵא 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. He, along with Aleph, Ayin, Resh, and Heth, cannot receive a dagesh. Nonetheless, it does receive a marking identical to the dagesh, to form He-mappiq (הּ). Although indistinguishable for most modern speakers or readers of Hebrew, the mapiq is placed in a word-final He 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 He In gematria, He symbolizes the number five, and when used at the beginning of Hebrew years, it means 5000 (i.e. התשנ״ד in numbers would be the date 5754). Attached to words, He may have three possible meanings: A preposition meaning the definite article "the", or the relative pronouns "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.) in modern Hebrew the frequency of the usage of he, out of all the letters, is 8.18%. He, representing five in gematria, is often found on amulets, symbolizing the five fingers of a hand, a very common talismanic symbol. In Judaism He 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 He with a geresh: ה׳. Syriac Heh In the Syriac alphabet, the fifth letter is ܗ — Heh (ܗܹܐ). It is pronounced as an. 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 hānoh (ܗܵܢܘܿ), meaning 'this is' or 'that is', or halelûya (ܗܵܠܹܠܘܼܝܵܐ). As a numeral, He represents the number five. Arabic hāʾ The letter is named hāʾ. It is written in several ways depending on its position in the word: Hāʾ is used as a suffix (with the harakat dictated by ʾIʿrab) indicating possession, indicating that the noun marked with the suffix belongs to a specific masculine possessor; for example, كِتَاب kitāb ("book") becomes كِتَابُهُ kitābuhu ("his book") with the addition of final hāʾ; the possessor is implied in the suffix. A longer example, هُوَ يَقْرَأُ كِتَابُهُ, (huwa yaqraʼu kitābahu, "he reads his book") more clearly indicates the possessor. The hāʾ suffix appended to a verb represents a masculine object (e.g. يَقْرَأُهُ, yaqraʾuhu, "he reads it"). The feminine form of this construction is in both cases ـهَا -hā. Attribution: Article text available under CC-BY-SA sourced from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_(letter)Public domain image sourced from http://wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Phoenician_he.svg

• published: 18 Sep 2013
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