Ayin (also ayn or ain; transliterated) is the sixteenth letter of the Semitic scripts, including Phoenician ʿayin, Hebrew ʿayin, Aramaic ʿē, Syriac ʿē ܥ, and Arabic ʿayn (where it is sixteenth in abjadi order only).
The letter represents a voiced pharyngeal fricative (pronounced as /link/) or a similarly articulated consonant. In some Semitic languages and dialects, the phonetic value of the letter has changed, or the phoneme has been lost altogether (thus, in the revived Modern Hebrew it is reduced to a glottal stop or is omitted entirely in part due to European influence).
The Phoenician letter is the origin of the Greek, Latin and Cyrillic letters O, O and O.
The Arabic character is the origin of the Latin-script letter Ƹ.
The letter name is derived from Proto-Semitic "eye", and the Phoenician letter had the shape of a circle or oval, clearly representing an eye, perhaps ultimately (via Proto-Sinaitic) derived from the ı͗r hieroglyph Egyptian (Ancient);: (Gardiner D4).[1]
The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek Ο, Latin O, and Cyrillic О, all representing vowels.
The sound represented by ayin is common to much of the Afroasiatic language family, such as in the Egyptian language, the Cushitic languages and the Semitic languages.
See also: Semitic romanization.
In Semitic philology, there is a long-standing tradition of rendering Semitic ayin with the Greek rough breathing mark (e.g. Arabic: ῾arab Arabic: عَرَب|rtl=yes Arabs).Depending on typography, this could look similar to either an articulate single opening quotation mark (e.g. Arabic: ʻarab Arabic: عَرَب|rtl=yes).or as a raised semi-circle open to the right (e.g. Arabic: ʿarab Arabic: عَرَب|rtl=yes).
This is by analogy to the transliteration of alef (glottal stop, hamza) by the Greek smooth breathing mark, rendered as single closing quotation mark or as raised semi-circle open to the left. This convention has been adopted by DIN in 1982 and by ISO in 1984 for Arabic (DIN 31635, ISO 233) and Hebrew (DIN 31636, ISO 259).
The shape of the "raised semi-circle" for ayin (ʿ) and alef (ʾ) was adopted by the Encyclopedia of Islam (edited 1913–1938, 1954–2005, and from 2007), and from there by the International Journal of Middle East Studies.[2] This convention has since also been followed by ISO (ISO 233-2 and ISO 259-2, 1993/4) and by DIN.A notable exception remains, ALA-LC (1991), the system used by the Library of Congress, continues to recommend modifier letter turned comma (for Hebrew) or left single quotation mark (for Arabic).[3]
The symbols for the corresponding phonemes in the International Phonetic Alphabet, for pharyngeal fricative (ayin) and for glottal stop (alef) were adopted in the 1928 revision.
In anglicized Arabic or Hebrew names or in loanwords, ayin is often omitted entirely: Iraq Arabic: عراق|rtl=yes, Arab Arabic: عرب|rtl=yes, Saudi Arabic: سعودي|rtl=yes, etc.; Afula Hebrew: עֲפוּלָה|rtl=yes, Arad Hebrew: עֲרָד|rtl=yes, etc.
Maltese, which uses a Latin alphabet, the only Semitic language to do so in its standard form, writes the ayin as . It is usually unvocalized in speech.The Somali Latin alphabet represents the ayin with the letter .The informal way to represent it in Arabic chat alphabet uses the digit as transliteration.
In Unicode, the recommended character for the transliteration of ayin is (a character in the Spacing Modifier Letters range, even though it is here not used as a modifier letter but as a full grapheme). This convention has been adopted by ISO 233-2 (1993) for Arabic and ISO 259-2 (1994) for Hebrew.
There are a number of alternative Unicode characters in use, some of which are easily confused or even considered equivalent in practice:[4]
Letters used to represent ayin:
It is worth noting that the phonemes corresponding to alef and ayin in Ancient Egyptian are by convention transliterated by more distinctive signs: Egyptian alef is rendered by two semi-circles open to the left, stacked vertically, and Egyptian ayin is rendered by a single full-width semi-circle open to the right. These characters were introduced in Unicode in version 5.1 (2008, Latin Extended-D range), and .
The Arabic letter Arabic: ﻉ|rtl=yes (called Arabic: ﻋَﻴْﻦْ|rtl=yes) is the eighteenth letter of the alphabet. It is written in one of several ways depending on its position in the word:
Arabic ʿayn is one of the most common letters in Arabic. Depending on the region, it ranges from a pharyngeal pronounced as /[<s></s>[[ʕ]]]/ to an epiglottal pronounced as /[<s></s>[[ʢ]]]/. It is voiced, its voiceless counterpart being Arabic: [[ح]]. Due to its position as the innermost letter to emerge from the throat, al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi, who wrote the first Arabic dictionary, actually started writing his Kitab al-'Ayn ('The Book of ʿAyn') with as the first letter instead of the eighteenth; he viewed its origins deep down in the throat as a sign that it was the first sound, the essential sound, the voice and a representation of the self.[5]
In the Persian language and other languages using the Persian alphabet, this letter has a different function and is pronounced as pronounced as /link/ (glottal stop), and rarely as pronounced as /link/ in some languages.
As in Hebrew, the letter originally stood for two sounds, pronounced as /link/ and pronounced as /link/. When pointing was developed, the sound pronounced as /link/ was distinguished with a dot on top (Arabic: [[غ]]|rtl=yes), to give the letter ghayn. In Maltese, which is written with the Latin alphabet, the digraph għ, called għajn, is used to write what was originally the same sound.
Because the sound is difficult for most non-Arabs to pronounce, it is often used as a shibboleth by Arabic speakers; other sounds, such as and are also used. It is typically represented with a 3 in the Arabic chat alphabet.
In some languages of Southeast Asia, the letter nga is used. The letter is derived from the letter ʿayn, which latter is derived from the letter ghayn, and it is thus written as:
This letter, derived from, is used to represent pronounced as /link/ in:
In the Wolofal alphabet, for writing Wolof in Arabic script, the letter ngōn is used, and it is thus written as:This letter also derived from the letter ʿayn, which latter is derived from the letter ghayn. This leter is to represent pronounced as /link/ in the Wolof language, a Niger-Congo language.
This letter also derived from the letter ʿayn, which latter is derived from the letter ghayn, with three dots inside the descender, to represent pronounced as /link/ in the Arwi script used for Tamil.
For the related characters, see ng (Arabic letter) and ghayn.
Hebrew spelling:
ʿayin has traditionally been described as a voiced pharyngeal fricative (pronounced as /[ʕ]/). However, this may be imprecise. Although a pharyngeal fricative has occasionally been observed for ʿayin in Arabic and so may occur in Hebrew as well, the sound is more commonly epiglottal (pronounced as /link/),[7] and may also be a pharyngealized glottal stop (pronounced as /[ʔˤ]/).
In some historical Sephardi and Ashkenazi pronunciations, ʿayin represented a velar nasal (pronounced as /[ŋ]/).[8] Remnants can be found in the Yiddish pronunciations of some words such as /ˈjaŋkəv/ and /ˈmansə/ from Hebrew (yaʿăqōḇ, "Jacob") and (maʿăse, "story"), but in other cases, the nasal has disappeared and been replaced by /j/, such as /ˈmajsə/ and /ˈmajrəv/ from Hebrew and (maʿărāḇ, "west"). In Israeli Hebrew (except for Mizrahi pronunciations), it represents a glottal stop in certain cases but is usually silent (it behaves the same as aleph). However, changes in adjoining vowels often testify to the former presence of a pharyngeal or epiglottal articulation. Additionally, it may be used as a shibboleth to identify the ethnolinguistic background of a Hebrew-speaker, as most Israeli Arab non-Jews and some of Israel's Mizrahi Jews (mainly Yemenite Jews) use the more traditional pronunciation, while other Hebrew-speakers pronounce it similar to Aleph.
Ayin is also one of the three letters that can take a furtive patach .
In Hebrew loanwords in Greek and Latin, ʿayin is sometimes reflected as /g/, since the biblical phonemes pronounced as /link/ (or "ʿ") and pronounced as /link/ (represented by "g") were both represented in Hebrew writing by the letter ʿayin (see Ġain). Gomorrah is from the original pronounced as //ʁamora// (modern ʿAmora) and Gaza from the original pronounced as //ʁazza// (ʿaza) (cf. Arabic غزة Ġazzah, IPA: [ˈɣazza].)
In Yiddish, the ʿayin is used to write the vowel e when it is not part of the diphthong ey.
In gematria, ʿayin represents the number 70.
ʿayin is also one of the seven letters which receive special crowns (called tagin) when written in a sefer Torah.