Ayin (also ayn or ain; transliterated  ) is the sixteenth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician  10px, Hebrew   , Aramaic   10 px, Syriac   ܥ, and Arabic   (where it is sixteenth in abjadi order only).
The letter represents a voiced pharyngeal fricative () 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 the European influence).
The Phoenician letter is the origin of the Greek, Latin and Cyrillic letter O. Origins
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  (Gardiner D4).Simons, F., "Proto-Sinaitic – Progenitor of the Alphabet" Rosetta 9 (2011), 16–40 (here: 38–40).
See also:  Goldwasser, Orly (Mar–Apr 2010).
"How the Alphabet Was Born from Hieroglyphs".
Biblical Archaeology Review.
Washington, DC: Biblical Archaeology Society.
36 (1), following William F. Albright, The Proto-Sinaitic Inscriptions and their Decipherment (1966), "Schematic Table of Proto-Sinaitic Characters" (fig. 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.
Transliteration
In Semitic philology, there is a long-standing tradition of  rendering Semitic ayin with the Greek rough breathing mark  (e.g.  ).
Depending on typography, this could look similar to  either an articulate  single opening quotation mark  (e.g.  ).
or as a raised semi-circle open to the right  (e.g.  ).
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 [] and alef [] 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.
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  or left single quotation mark .
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   , Arab     ,  Saudi   , etc.;  Afula ,  Arad ,  etc.
In Arabic, the presence of ayin in front of u can sometimes be inferred even if it is not rendered separately, as the vowel quality is shifted towards o (e.g.  Oman  , Omar   , 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 ʿayin with the letter .
The informal way to represent it in Arabic chat alphabet uses the digit  as transliteration.
Unicode
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:"Various small, raised hook- or comma-shaped characters are often substituted for a  glottal stop—for instance, U+02BC  modifier letter apostrophe, U+02BB modifier letter turned comma, U+02C0 modifier letter glottal stop, or U+02BE modifier letter  right  half  ring.
U+02BB,  in  particular,  is  used  in  Hawaiian  orthography  as  the okina."
The Unicode Standard Version 7.0: chapter 7.1 "Latin", p. 294.
̔ (U+0314 ), the character recommended to represent Greek rough breathing),
single opening quotation mark ‘ (U+2018),
ʻ (U+02BB ),
ʽ (U+02BD ),
the grave accent ` U+0060, from its use as single opening quotation mark in ASCII environments, used for ayin in ArabTeX.
Other variants chosen to represent ayin as a full grapheme (rather than a sign suggestive of an apostrophe or a diacritic):
a superscript c (c, or ᶜ U+1D9C ),
the IPA symbol for pharyngealization ,   (U+02C1 , U+02E4 ), or  a superscript   (ʕ, U+0295 ), the IPA symbol for voiced pharyngeal fricative .
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), ꜣ U+A723  and ꜥ U+A725 .
Hebrew ayin
[[Orthography|Orthographic]] variants
Hebrew spelling:
ʿayin, along with Aleph, Resh, He and Heth, cannot receive a dagesh.
Phonetic representation
ʿayin has traditionally been described as a voiced pharyngeal fricative ().
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 (),Ladefoged, Peter & Ian Maddieson (1996).
The sounds of the world's languages.
Oxford: Blackwells.
and may also be a pharyngealized glottal stop ().
In some historical Sephardi and Ashkenazi pronunciations, ʿayin represented a velar nasal ().
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.
As well, it may be used as a shibboleth to identify the social background of a speaker, as Arabs and some of the Mizrahim (mainly of Yemenite origin) 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  (or "ʿ") and  (represented by "g") were both represented in Hebrew writing by the letter ʿayin (see Ġain).
Gomorrah is from the original  (modern ʿAmora) and Gaza from the original  (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.
Significance
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.
Arabic ʿayn
The Arabic letter  (called  ) is the eighteenth letter of the alphabet.
It is written in one of several ways depending on its position in the word: Pronunciation
Arabic ʿayn is one of the most common letters in Arabic.
Depending on the region, it ranges from a pharyngeal  to an epiglottal .
It is voiced, its unvoiced counterpart being .
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 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.Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, The Mute Immortals Speak: Pre-Islamic Poetry and the Poetics of Ritual, pg.
178.
Cornell Studies in Political Economy.
Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1993.
In the Persian language and other languages using the Persian alphabet, it is pronounced as  (glottal stop), and rarely as  in some languages.
As in Hebrew, the letter originally stood for two sounds,  and .
When pointing was developed, the sound  was distinguished with a dot on top (), to give the letter ghayn.
In Maltese, which is written with the Latin alphabet, the digraph għ, called ʿajn, 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.
Character encodings
See also
Transliteration of Ancient Egyptian
Notes
References
External links
