Hwair

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

Hwair (Ƕair) is the name of 𐍈, the Gothic letter expressing the /hw/-sound (reflected in English by the inverted wh-spelling), 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 (vol. 18) in the 1860s). 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 *kʷ after it underwent Grimm's law. The same phoneme in Old English and Old High German is conventionally and accurately spelled hw.

The Gothic letter is assigned Unicode U+10348 𐍈, the Latin letter has codepoints U+0195 (lowercase) and U+01F6 (uppercase). It is not to be confused with the similar looking IPA bilabial click symbol, ʘ. It can also be inputted by typing Alt + 0405 for ƕ, and Alt + 0502 for Ƕ.

[edit] See also

• Phonological history of wh
• Wh (digraph)