- published: 30 Jan 2009
- views: 6040004
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 ([h]).
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.
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 spelling: הֵא
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.