Talk:Ayin

Untitled
I've included a reference to the way Maltese represents the 'ayin' but I'm not sure it's in the right place. Any suggestions?

Also, should I add this article to WikiProject Malta? It's already been tagged by WikiProject Judaism (would I need to link it to an Arabic equivalent too??)- thanks. Kalindoscopy (talk) 05:45, 20 February 2008 (UTC)
 * I think that, since this is more about the character(s) in related semitic writing systems that you probably shouldn't add it to WikiProject Malta, but it wouldn't hurt to ask someone there. — Æµ§œš¹  [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]  08:08, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

I've just noticed the changes you made: thanks. Re adding it to WP Malta, I've left a comment there about this whole ajn thing. Hopefully somebody directly involved will pick it up soon. Kalindoscopy (talk) 12:00, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

Another function of the ayin in Hebrew
... is the separation of vowels, I guess? So it is used to separate two a's to state they are not to be pronounced as one long vowel (aa as in Dutch vaag) but a'a as in Yemen's capital Sana'a. -andy 92.227.72.27 (talk) 02:31, 20 March 2008 (UTC)
 * That doesn't sound right at all. Are you just guessing?  Sana'a is pronounced with a long a  in Arabic. — Æµ§œš¹  [aɪm ˈfɻɛ̃ⁿdˡi]  02:34, 20 March 2008 (UTC)


 * I have three books to help me learn Hebrew, and only one of these books suggests the "ayin" sound is a laryngeal.  My other two books say it is silent.   If we find the ayin between two vowels, is it okay to pronounce it like a glottal stop?   I wish my computer could transmit audio sounds reliably, but every time I try to click something in Wikipedia, supposedly being an audio file of some kind, I get nothing.   The main article would be a lot more useful if there were a sound spectrograph of the ayin, separated by various consonants, and separated by various vowels.   216.99.219.18 (talk) 09:23, 4 October 2009 (UTC)


 * One of my books says that ayin is pronounced with the vocal chords vibrating (i.e., it is 'voiced' as opposed to 'unvoiced').  Is this true of all dialects, or just some?  216.99.198.86 (talk) 21:44, 4 October 2009 (UTC)


 * Well in the intro it says that it is a consonant, and in the examples included (ʿayin, al-ʿIrāq, ʿUmān, al-ʿArabiyyah as-Saʿūdiyyah, ʿArabī, ʿAmmān, yaʿăqōḇ, maʿăse, maʿărāḇ, ʿAmora, ʿAza) it is always next to a vowel and not to a consonant. --Jerome Potts (talk) 06:25, 20 April 2014 (UTC)

Uniocode alternatives
This is quite a mess. It seems that the recommendation of the Unicode Consortium (1991) is ʿ (U+02BF) "modifier letter left half ring". This recommendation was followed by ISO. Other authorities do not follow it:
 * 1) those (who?) who prefer the historical tradition use the same character as the Greek rough breathing, whoch would be  ̔ (U+0314 combining reversed comma above)
 * 2) some, like the Library of Congress, just want any kind of  "single opening quotation mark" and/or "typographic apostrophe", "turned high comma", which is overloaded by Unicode by (at least)  "single opening quotation mark" ‘ (U+2018) and" Modifier letter turned comma" ʻ (U+02BB), and probably others
 * 3) pre-Unicode or ASCII-compatible schemes use ` U+0060, "grave accent", because this is the ASCII way of spelling "single opening quotation mark"
 * 4)  a superscript c (c, or ᶜ U+1D9C MODIFIER LETTER SMALL C), idk if this has any official recommendation, but it is used by people who either cannot be bothered to search for the Unicode character, or who think that all these apostrophes or half-rings typographically are not sufficiently suggestive of representing a full grapheme.
 * 5) again, idk if anyone officially recommends this, but some publications apparently just turn to the IPA symbol (introduced in 1932, and  indeed based on the convention of tranliterating ayin, so there is historical justification), choose any of  ˁ, ˤ, ʕ (the latter optionally as superscript)
 * 6) there is also Egyptological aying ꜥ -- I don't think anyone uses this, even though it is the only character unambiguously intended as representing "romanization of ayin"; interestingly some Windows font appear to render it as looking identical to ʿ  U+02BF  "modifier letter left half ring".

Evidence both from published standards (the original document needs to specify the Unicode codepoint! Many online sources tend to "guess" the most appropriate Unicode character based on a printed representation of a transliteration standard, this does not count as an actual reference) and from de-facto usage in the wild is needed!

I am not sure about DIN. There is a revision of the DIN standard from 2011, and they may or may not have specified Unicode characters. From this it appears DIN recommends "single opening quotation mark" ‘ (U+2018) for alef(!), but this may just be the fault of the typographer who prepared the article for the journal, it isn't stated explicitly that this is the case!

Needless to say, for the purposes of Wikipedia I would recommend we follow the convention endorsed by Unicode and ISO, i.e. ʿ (U+02BF). --dab (𒁳) 13:10, 16 November 2017 (UTC)

representation

 * The letter represents or is used to represent ...

What is the distinction between these alternatives? —Tamfang (talk) 17:53, 20 September 2018 (UTC)

Historical pronunciations
I found a source for historical pronunciations of ayin as [ŋ], see here: [PDF] Romanization of the Hebrew alphabet H Shabath - 1973 - ruor.uottawa.ca / https://uottawa-primo.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/primo-explore/fulldisplay?docid=TN_proquest873832382&context=PC&vid=UOTTAWA&lang=en_US&search_scope=default&adaptor=primo_central_multiple_fe&tab=default_tab&query=any,contains,Romanization%20of%20the%20Hebrew%20alphabet&sortby=rank&mode=basic I'm not able to download it right now, I will add page references later this week... there is a list of Sephardi, Mizrahi, and Ashkenazi pronunciations in the end of the document.

Wathiik (talk) 09:26, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

"Ꜥ" listed at Redirects for discussion
A discussion is taking place to address the redirect Ꜥ. The discussion will occur at Redirects for discussion/Log/2020 October 8 until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion. 𝟙𝟤𝟯𝟺𝐪𝑤𝒆𝓇𝟷𝟮𝟥𝟜𝓺𝔴𝕖𝖗𝟰 (𝗍𝗮𝘭𝙠) 13:57, 8 October 2020 (UTC)

ᴥ
I know nothing about Sami languages but are letters ᴥ and ᵜ used for anything else than Sami (and emoticons)? As I understand their shape is believed to be derived from ـعـ, hence their Unicode names, but they seem to come from where they are extensively used and described as standing for Kehlkopfverschlusslaut (glottal stop?). The question about relevance was for the whole bullet point, not just about the usage trivia. – MwGamera (talk) 20:28, 28 December 2023 (UTC)


 * I have no idea. If it's only found in that one dictionary, it wouldn't seem to be notable. I think a Wiktionary page would be worthwhile to clarify the scope of the character. I've migrated it there. — kwami (talk) 01:15, 29 December 2023 (UTC)