| 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 . Its sound value is 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 ARABIC Hāʼ The letter is named ''hāʼ'', and is written is several ways depending in its position in the word: Hāʼ is used as a suffix (with the Harakat dictated by I`rab ) indicating Possession , specifically indicating that the noun marked with the suffix belongs to a specific Masculine possessor; for example, كتاب ''kitāb'' ("book") becomes كتابه ''kitābihi'' ("his book") with the addition of final hāʼ; the possessor is implied in the suffix. A longer example, هو يقراء كتابه, (''huwa yaqraʼ kitābuhu'', "he reads his book") more clearly indicates the possessor. The feminine form of this construction is ـها ''-hā''. HE IN HEBREW Pronunciation In Modern Hebrew , the letter represents a Voiceless Glottal Fricative . may also be dropped, although this pronunciation is seen as substandard. Also, in many variant Hebrew pronunciations the letter may represent a glottal stop. In word-final position, He is used to indicate an ''a''-vowel, usually that of 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 consonant should be aspirated in that position. It is generally used in Hebrew to indicate the third-person feminine singular genitive marker. Today such a pronunciation only occurs 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. SYRIAC HE In the Syriac Alphabet , the fifth letter is — He (). It is pronounced as a |
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