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Waw (wāw "hook") is the sixth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician wāw 𐤅, Aramaic waw 𐡅, Hebrew vav ו , Syriac waw ܘ and Arabic wāw و (sixth in abjadi order; 27th in modern Arabic order). It represents the consonant in classical Hebrew, and in modern Hebrew, as well as the vowels and .
Originally, the alphabet was an abjad consisting only of consonants, but is now considered an impure abjad. As with other abjads, such as the Arabic alphabet, during its centuries-long use scribes devised means of indicating vowel sounds by separate vowel points, known in Hebrew as niqqud.
Whereas it was originally called waw or wau, its most common appellation in classical Greek is digamma; as a numeral, it was called episēmon during the Byzantine era and is now known as stigma after the Byzantine ligature combining σ-τ as ϛ. Digamma or wau was part of the original archaic Greek alphabet as initially adopted from Phoenician.
The Hebrew alphabet is a script that was derived from the Aramaic alphabet during the Persian, Hellenistic and Roman periods (c. 500 BCE – 50 CE). It replaced the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet which was used in the earliest epigraphic records of the Hebrew language .
The Phoenician alphabet continued to be used by the Samaritans and developed into the Samaritan alphabet, that is an immediate continuation of the Phoenician script without intermediate non-Israelite evolutionary stages. The Samaritans have continued to use the script for writing both Hebrew and Aramaic texts until the present day.
Letter Perfect: The Marvelous History of Our Alphabet from A to Z. Broadway Books. ISBN 0-7679-1173-3. Goldwasser, Orly, How the Alphabet Was Born from Hieroglyphs Archived 2016-06-30 at the Wayback Machine Biblical Archaeology Review 36:02, Mar/Apr 2010. Millard, A. R. (1986) "The Infancy of the Alphabet" World Archaeology. pp. 390–398.
The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BC. [2] [3] It was derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, [4] and is the earliest known alphabetic script to systematically write vowels as well as consonants. [5]
Wolofal, like its parent system, the Arabic script, is an abjad.This means that only consonants are represented with letters. Vowels are shown with diacritics.As a matter of fact, writing of diacritics, including zero-vowel (sukun) diacritic as per the orthographic are mandatory.