Hwair
|
Some words with Hwair, in Joseph Wright's Grammar of the Gothic Language. |
Hwair (
) is the name of
, the
Gothic letter expressing the
wh-sound, transliterated with the
h+v ligature (lowercase , uppercase ). 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 or [], 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 conventially spelled
hw, without the ligature.
The Gothic letter is assigned
Unicode U+10348 , the Latin
h+v ligature U+0195 (lowercase) and U+01F6 (uppercase).
