He (letter)

, Aramaic, Hebrew , Syriac and Arabic , expressing a voiceless glottal fricative ().

, Latin E and Cyrillic Ye. 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-West Semitic there were still three voiceless fricatives, uvular glottal and pharyngeal . In the Wadi el-Hol script, these appear to be expressed by derivatives of V28 "thread", , himjar_ha2.PNG , himjar_kha.PNG , Ge'ez ሀ, ሐ, ኀ, and O6 ' "court". In the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, ' and ' are merged into Heth "fence", while ' is replaced by He "window".

He in Hebrew:

Pronunciation:

In modern Hebrew, the letter can either be pronunced like the English letter H, (a voiceless glottal fricative), or simply as silent, a practice common among Israelis. It is often viewed as sloppy to pronounce the He as silent.

Variations on written form/pronunciation:

He generally is to be pronounced as IPA //, like the letter h in English, but in many variant Hebrew pronunciations the letter may become a glottal stop or not be pronunced at all. In word-final position, He is used to indicate an a-vowel, usually a 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 letter should be aspirated in that position. It is generally used in Hebrew to indicate the third-person feminine singular genitive marker. Today the mapiq is only pronounced 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. התשנד in numbers would be the date 5754).

Attached to words, He may have three possible meanings:

A preposition meaning "the", "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.)

He, being 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 chupchik: 'ה.

At the seder, during Yachatz there is a tradition to break the matzah into the shape of the letter He.

Phoenician alphabet | Arabic letters