| He (letter) |
Article Index for He |
Information AboutHe (letter) |
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He is the fifth letter of many Semitic Alphabets , including Phoenician , Aramaic , Hebrew , Syriac and Arabic , expressing a Voiceless Glottal Fricative (). The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek Epsilon , Etruscan , 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 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:
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. |
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