Waw/Vav is the sixth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician wāw, Aramaicwaw, Hebrew:wikt:וי״ו|vav, Syriacwaw ܘ and Arabic:wikt:واو|wāw و. It represents the consonant in original Hebrew, and in modern Hebrew, as well as the vowels and. In text with niqqud, a dot is added to the left or on top of the letter to indicate, respectively, the two vowel pronunciations. It is the origin of Greek Ϝ and Υ, Cyrillic У, Latin F and V, and the derived "Latin"- or "Roman"- alphabet lettersU, W, and Y.
Origin
The letter likely originated with an Egyptian hieroglyph which represented : T3 In Modern Hebrew, the wordvav is used to mean both "hook" and the letter's name.
Arabic wāw
The letter و is named واوwāw and is written in several ways depending on its position in the word: Wāw is used to represent four distinct phonetic features:
A consonant, pronounced as a voiced labial-velar approximant', which is the case whenever it is at the beginnings of words, but normally occurs also in the middle or end.
A long '. The preceding consonant could either have no diacritic or a short-wāw-vowel mark, damma, to aid in the pronunciation by hinting to the following long vowel.
A long ' In many dialects, as a result of the monophthongization that underwent the diphthong in most of the words.
A part of a diphthong, '. In this case it has no diacritic, but could be marked with a sukun in some traditions. The preceding consonant could either have no diacritic or have fatḥa sign, hinting to the first vowel in the diphthong.
As a vowel, wāw can serve as the carrier of a hamza: ؤ. Wāw serves several functions in Arabic. Perhaps foremost among them is that it is the primary conjunction in Arabic, equivalent to "and"; it is usually prefixed to other conjunctions, such as وَلَكِن wa-lākin, meaning "but". Another function is the "oath", by preceding a noun of great significantly valued by the speaker. It is often literally translatable to "By..." or "I swear to...", and is often used in the Qur'an in this way, and also in the generally fixed construction والله wallāh.
Derived letters
With an additional triple dot diacritic above waw, the letter then named ve is used to represent distinctively the consonant in Arabic-basedUyghur. in Sorani Kurdish; in Arabic-based Kazakh; in Uyghur.
Thirty-fourth letter of the Azerbaijani Arabic script, represents Ô.
It is also used for short vowel or in a lot of languages, for example "u" in bull for or, used in a lot of languages, for example o in bold in Uyghur and also in other languages with a similar vowel. in Southern Kurdish. In Jawi script: Used for.
In modern Hebrew, the frequency of the usage of vav, out of all the letters, is about 10.00%.
Vav as consonant
Consonantal vav generally represents a voiced labiodental fricative in Ashkenazi, European Sephardi, Persian, Caucasian, Italian and modern Israeli Hebrew, and was originally a labial-velar approximant. In modern Israeli Hebrew, some loanwords, the pronunciation of whose source contains, and their derivations, are pronounced with : – . Modern Hebrew has no standardized way to distinguish orthographically between and. The pronunciation is determined by prior knowledge or must be derived through context. Some non standard spellings of the sound are sometimes found in modern Hebrew texts, such as word-initial double-vav: – or, rarely, vav with a geresh: –.
Vav with a dot on top
Vav can be used as a mater lectionis for an o vowel, in which case it is known as a ḥolam male, which in pointed text is marked as vav with a dot above it. It is pronounced . The distinction is normally ignored, and the HEBREW POINT HOLAM is used in all cases. The vowel can be denoted without the vav, as just the dot placed above and to the left of the letter it points, and it is then called ḥolam ḥaser. Some inadequate typefaces do not support the distinction between the ḥolam male ⟨⟩, the consonantal vav pointed with a ḥolam ḥaser ⟨⟩ . To display a consonantal vav with ḥolam ḥaser correctly, the typeface must either support the vav with the Unicode combining character "HEBREW POINT HOLAM HASER FOR VAV" or the precomposed character . Compare the three:
The vav with the combining character HEBREW POINT HOLAM:
The vav with the combining character HEBREW POINT HOLAM HASER FOR VAV:
The precomposed character:
Vav with a dot in the middle
Vav can also be used as a mater lectionis for, in which case it is known as a shuruk, and in text with niqqud is marked with a dot in the middle. Shuruk and vav with a dagesh look identical and are only distinguishable through the fact that in text with niqqud, vav with a dagesh will normally be attributed a vocal point in addition, e.g. , "a market", as opposed to , "to market". In the word , "marketing", the first denotes a vav with dagesh, the second a shuruk, being the vowel attributed to the first.
Vav at the beginning of the word has several possible meanings:
vav conjunctive is a vav connecting two words or parts of a sentence; it is a grammatical conjunction meaning 'and' , cognate to the Arabic. This is the most common usage.
vav consecutive, mainly biblical, commonly mistaken for the previous type of vav; it indicates consequence of actions and reverses the tense of the verb following it:
*when placed in front of a verb in the imperfect tense, it changes the verb to the perfect tense. For example, yomar means 'he will say' and vayomar means 'he said';
*when placed in front of a verb in the perfect, it changes the verb to the imperfect tense. For example, ahavtah means 'you loved', and ve'ahavtah means 'you will love'.
In Yiddish, the letter is used for several orthographic purposes in native words:
Alone, a single vov represents the vowel in standard Yiddish.
The digraph, "tsvey vovn", represents the consonant.
The digraph, consisting of a vov followed by a yud, represents the diphthong .
The single vov may be written with a dot on the left when necessary to avoid ambiguity and distinguish it from other functions of the letter. For example, the word vu 'where' is spelled, as tsvey vovn followed by a single vov; the single vov indicating is marked with a dot in order to distinguish which of the three vovs represents the vowel. Some texts instead separate the digraph from the single vov with a silent aleph. Loanwords from Hebrew or Aramaic in Yiddish are spelled as they are in their language of origin.
Syriac Waw
In the Syriac alphabet, the sixth letter is ܘ. Waw is pronounced . When it is used as a mater lectionis, a waw with a dot above the letter is pronounced , and a waw with a dot under the letter is pronounced . Was has an alphabetic-numeral value of 6.
