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Concept
Waw (letter)
Summary
Waw ( "hook") is the sixth letter of the Semitic abjads, including
Phoenician wāw ,
Aramaic waw ,
Hebrew vav ו,
Syriac waw ܘ
and Arabic wāw و (sixth in abjadi order; 27th in modern Arabic order).
It represents the consonant w in classical Hebrew, and v in modern Hebrew, as well as the vowels u and o. In text with niqqud, a dot is added to the left or on top of the letter to indicate, respectively, the two vowel pronunciations.
It is the origin of Greek Ϝ (digamma) and Υ (upsilon), Cyrillic У, Latin F and V and later Y, and the derived Latin- or Roman-alphabet letters U, and W.
The letter likely originated with an Egyptian hieroglyph which represented the word mace (transliterated as ḥḏ, hedj): T3
In Modern Hebrew, the word vav is used to mean both "hook" and the letter's name (the name is also written ), while in Syriac and Arabic, waw to mean hook has fallen out of usage.
The Arabic letter و is named واو wāw and is written in several ways depending on its position in the word:
Wāw is used to represent four distinct phonetic features:
A consonant, pronounced as a voiced labial-velar approximant /w/, which is the case whenever it is at the beginning of a word, and sometimes elsewhere.
A long /uː/. The preceding consonant could either have no diacritic or a short-wāw-vowel mark, damma, to aid in the pronunciation by hinting to the following long vowel.
A long /oː/ in many dialects, as a result of the monophthongization that the diphthong /aw/ underwent in most of words.
A part of a diphthong, /aw/. In this case it has no diacritic, but could be marked with a sukun in some traditions. The preceding consonant could either have no diacritic or have sign, hinting to the first vowel /a/ in the diphthong.
As a vowel, wāw can serve as the carrier of a hamza: ؤ.
Wāw is the sole letter of the common Arabic word wa, the primary conjunction in Arabic, equivalent to "and". In writing, it is prefixed to the following word, sometimes including other conjunctions, such as وَلَكِن wa-lākin, meaning "but".
Official source
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