He (letter)

He is the fifth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician hē 𐤄, Hebrew hē ה, Aramaic hē 𐡄, Syriac hē ܗ, and Arabic hāʾ ه. It is also related to the Ancient North Arabian 𐪀‎‎‎, South Arabian 𐩠, and Ge'ez ሀ. Its sound value is the voiceless glottal fricative ([h]).

The proto-Canaanite letter gave rise to the Greek Epsilon Ε ε, Etruscan 𐌄, Latin E, Ë and Ɛ, and Cyrillic Е, Ё, Є, Э, and Ҩ. He, like all Phoenician letters, represented a consonant, but the Latin, Greek and Cyrillic equivalents have all come to represent vowel sounds.

Origins

In Proto-Northwest Semitic there were still three voiceless fricatives: uvular ḫ [χ], glottal h [h], and pharyngeal ḥ [ħ]. In the Wadi el-Hol script, these appear to be expressed by derivatives of the following Egyptian hieroglyphs ḫayt "thread",

hillul "jubilation", compare South Arabian h, ḥ, ḫ, Ge'ez ሀ, ሐ, ኀ, and ḥasir "court".

In the Phoenician alphabet, ḫayt and ḥasir are merged into Heth "fence", while hillul is replaced by He "window".

Arabic hāʾ

The letter is named hāʾ. It is written in several ways depending on its position in the word:

Hāʾ is used as a suffix (with the harakat dictated by ʾIʿrab) indicating possession, indicating that the noun marked with the suffix belongs to a specific masculine possessor; for example, كِتَاب kitāb ("book") becomes كِتَابُهُ kitābuhu ('his book') with the addition of final hāʾ; the possessor is implied in the suffix. A longer example, هُوَ يَقْرَأُ كِتَابَهُ, (huwa yaqraʼu kitābahu, "he reads his book") more clearly indicates the possessor.