Hwair

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Some words with Hwair, in Joseph Wright's Grammar of the Gothic Language.
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Some words with Hwair, in Joseph Wright's Grammar of the Gothic Language.

Hwair (ƕair) is the name of , the Gothic letter expressing the wh-sound, transliterated with a special Latin letter of the same name (lowercase ƕ, uppercase Ƕ, introduced by philologists around 1900 to replace the digraph hv formerly used to express the phoneme, e.g. by Migne in the 1860s).[citation needed] The name is recorded by Alcuin in Codex Vindobonensis 795 as uuaer. There was no Elder Futhark rune for the phoneme, so that unlike those of most Gothic letters, the name does not continue the name of a rune (but see qairþra).

Hwair represents IPA: [xʷ] or [ʍ], the Germanic pronunciation of the Indo-European labiovelar * after it underwent Grimm's law. The same phoneme in Old English and Old High German is conventionally spelled hw.

The Gothic letter is assigned Unicode U+10348 𐍈, the Latin letter has codepoints U+0195 (lowercase) and U+01F6 (uppercase).

The Latin alphabet
Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo Pp Qq Rr Ss Tt Uu Vv Ww Xx Yy Zz
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