Waw ( "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 . 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.
Origin
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.
Arabic Wāw
The Arabic letter is named 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 , which is the case whenever it is at the beginning of a word, and sometimes elsewhere. A long . 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 in many dialects, as a result of the monophthongization that the diphthong underwent in most of words. A part of a diphthong, . 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 in the diphthong.
As a vowel, wāw can serve as the carrier of a hamza: .
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 wa-lākin, meaning "but". Another function is the "oath", by preceding a noun of great significance to the speaker. It is often literally translatable to "By..." or "I swear to...", and is often used in the Qur'an in this way, and also in the generally fixed construction wallāh ("By Allah!" or "I swear to God!"). The word also appears, particularly in classical verse, in the construction known as wāw rubba, to introduce a description.
Derived letters
With an additional triple dot diacritic above waw, the letter then named ve is used to represent distinctively the consonant in Arabic-based Uyghur, Kazakh and Kyrgyz.
in Kurdish and Beja; in Arabic-based Kazakh; in Uyghur. Thirty-fourth letter of the Azerbaijani Arabic script, represents ü .
A variant of Kurdish û ; historically for Serbo-Croatian .
Also used in Kyrgyz for Үү /y/.
in Uyghur. Also found in Quranic Arabic as in "prayer" for an Old Higazi merged with , in modern spelling .
in Southern Kurdish.
In Jawi script for . Also used in Balochi for and .
Other letters
See Arabic script in Unicode
Hebrew Waw / Vav
Hebrew spelling: or or .
The letter appears with or without a hook on different sans-serif fonts, for example Arial, DejaVu Sans, Arimo, Open Sans: ו Tahoma, Alef, Heebo: ו
Pronunciation in Modern Hebrew
Vav has three orthographic variants, each with a different phonemic value and phonetic realisation:
In modern Hebrew, the frequency of the usage of vav, out of all the letters, is about 10.00%.
Vav as consonant
Consonantal vav () generally represents a voiced labiodental fricative (like the English v) in Ashkenazi, European Sephardi, Persian, Caucasian, Italian and modern Israeli Hebrew, and was originally a labial-velar approximant .
In modern Israeli Hebrew, some loanwords, the pronunciation of whose source contains , and their derivations, are pronounced with : – (but: – ).
Modern Hebrew has no standardized way to distinguish orthographically between and . The pronunciation is determined by prior knowledge or must be derived through context.
Some non standard spellings of the sound are sometimes found in modern Hebrew texts, such as word-initial double-vav: – (word-medial double-vav is both standard and common for both and , see table above) or, rarely, vav with a geresh: – .
Vav with a dot on top
Vav can be used as a mater lectionis for an o vowel, in which case it is known as a , which in pointed text is marked as vav with a dot above it. It is pronounced (phonemically transcribed more simply as ).