or Ayin is the sixteenth letter in many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew and Arabic (in abjadi order). It originally represented a pharyngeal consonant (IPA ).

It is usually transliterated with , a symbol based on the Greek spiritus asper , for example in the name of the letter itself, . Less accurate transcriptions may use an apostrophe, failing to distinguish the ayin from the glottal stop consonant aleph. Even this representation is often omitted, as these symbols are often misinterpreted as punctuation instead of actual consonants. The Somali language represents the ayin with the ordinary Roman letter c, and similarly, Egyptologists will often use the superscript letter ^c to represent this sound.

The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek Omicron (Ο), and hence the Latin O, and the equivalent in the Cyrillic alphabet, all representing vowels.

Origins

The letter name is derived from West Semitic "eye" (in modern Arabic literally "eye"; in Hebrew: ayin), and the Proto-Canaanite letter had an eye-shape, ultimately derived from the hieroglyph (ỉr) D4

), and Ghayin.

Hebrew Ayin

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Ayin, along with Aleph, Resh, He, and Heth, cannot receive a dagesh.

Pronunciation

Ayin traditionally represents a pharyngeal sound that has no equivalent in the English language (IPA ).

Ayin is pronounced by some as a glottal stop consonant sound, but is generally pronounced as silent (i.e. it is given the same treatment as Aleph).

In some historical Sephardi pronunciations, `Ayin was pronounced as a velar nasal "ng" consonant sound, while in non-"Mizrahi" modern Israeli Hebrew it is pronounced as a glottal stop consonant sound in certain cases, but is mostly silent (i.e. it is given the same treatment as Aleph). However, certain changes in adjoining vowels often testify to the former presence of `Ayin, even if `Ayin itself is no longer pronounced. Some historians have postulated the existence of an older "Ghayin" representing a voiced uvular fricative , which was incorporated into the softer Ayin. In Arabic, Ghayin was introduced as a variant of Ayin.

In Yiddish, the ‘Áyin is used as a vowel, rather than a consonant, and is pronounced /e/.

Transliteration

In Hebrew transliteration, the letter Ayin can be transliterated as ` or as G. Because of this, we get Gomorrah from `Amora and Gaza from `Aza (which eventually gave us the English word gauze).

Significance

In gematria, ayin represents the number 70.

Ayin is also one of the seven letters which receive a special crown (called a tagin) when written in a Sefer Torah. See Shin, Gimmel, Teth, Nun, Zayin, and Tzadi.

Phoenician alphabet | Arabic letters

ע | Ayin (lizherenn) | Ajin | Ayn | Ayin (lettre) | ע | Ajin | Ajin