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For example, the second letter of the Phoenician alphabet was based on the Egyptian hieroglyph for "house" (a sketch of a house); the Semitic word for 'house' was bet; hence the Phoenician letter was called bet and had the sound value b.
Hebrew spelling: בֵּית The Hebrew letter represents two different phonemes: a "b" sound (/b/) (bet) and a "v" sound (/v/) (vet). When Hebrew is written Ktiv menuqad (with niqqud diacritics) the two are distinguished by a dot (called a dagesh) in the centre of the letter for /b/ and no dot for /v/.
Kaph is thought to be derived from a pictogram of a hand (in both modern Arabic and modern Hebrew, kaph כף means "palm" or "grip"), though in Arabic the a in the name of the letter (كاف) is pronounced longer than the a in the word meaning "palm" (كَف).
The Hebrew alphabet (Hebrew: אָלֶף־בֵּית עִבְרִי, Alefbet ivri), known variously by scholars as the Ktav Ashuri, Jewish script, square script and block script, is a unicameral abjad script used in the writing of the Hebrew language and other Jewish languages, most notably Yiddish, Ladino, Judeo-Arabic, and Judeo-Persian. In ...
While H is a consonant in the Latin alphabet, the Greek and Cyrillic equivalents represent vowel sounds, though the letter was originally a consonant in Greek and this usage later evolved into the rough breathing character. [1] The Phoenician letter also gave rise to the archaic Greek letter heta, as well as a variant of Cyrillic letter I, short I.
When a word in modern Hebrew borrowed from another language ends with /p/, the non-final form is used (e.g. ּפִילִיפ /ˈfilip/ "Philip"), while borrowings ending in /f/ still use the Pe Sofit (e.g. כֵּיף /kef/ "fun", from Arabic). This is because native Hebrew words, which always use the final form at the end, cannot end in /p/.
Samekh or samech is the fifteenth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician sāmek 𐤎, Hebrew sāmeḵ ס , Aramaic samek 𐡎, and Syriac semkaṯ ܣ. Samekh represents a voiceless alveolar fricative /s/. In the Hebrew language, the samekh has the same pronunciation as the left-dotted shin. The numerical value of samekh is 60.
The letter is named "tsadek" in Yiddish, [1] and Hebrew speakers often give it a similar name as well. This name for the letter probably originated from a fast recitation of the alphabet (i.e., "tsadi, qoph" → "tsadiq, qoph"), influenced by the Hebrew word tzadik, meaning "righteous person". [2]