Hwair


Hwair is the name of, the Gothic letter expressing the or sound. Hwair is also the name of the Latin ligature ƕ used to transcribe Gothic.

Name

The name of the Gothic letter is recorded by Alcuin in Codex Vindobonensis 795 as uuaer. The meaning of the name ƕair was probably "cauldron, pot"
; comparative reconstruction shows kʷer- in Proto-Indo-European.
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.

Sound

Gothic ƕ is the reflex of Common Germanic xʷ, which in turn continues the Indo-European labiovelar kʷ after it underwent Grimm's law. The same phoneme in Old English and Old High German is spelled hw.

Transliteration

The Gothic letter is transliterated with the Latin ligature of the same name,, which was introduced by Wilhelm Braune in the 1882 edition of Gotische Grammatik, as suggested in a review of the 1880 edition by Hermann Collitz, to replace the digraph hv which was formerly used to express the phoneme, e.g. by Migne in the 1860s. It is used, for example, in Dania transcription. It was also used to represent the voiceless labial–velar fricative in a 1921 edition of the International Phonetic Alphabet.

Related letters and other similar characters

Note that the Unicode names of the Latin letters are different: "Hwair" and "Hv".