Washington, DC: Biblical Archaeology Society | It is worth noting that the phonemes corresponding to alef and ayin in are by convention by more distinctive signs: is rendered by two semi-circles open to the left, stacked vertically, and is rendered by a single full-width semi-circle open to the right |
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Because the sound is difficult for most non-Arabs to pronounce, it is often used as a shibboleth by Arabic speakers; other sounds, such as and are also used | These characters were introduced in Unicode in version 5 |
There are a number of alternative Unicode characters in use, some of which are easily confused or even considered equivalent in practice:• This convention has been adopted by DIN in 1982 and by ISO in 1984 for Arabic , and Hebrew ,.
2The Phoenician letter gave rise to the , Latin , and , all representing vowels | In Israeli Hebrew except for Mizrahi pronunciations , it represents a glottal stop in certain cases but is usually silent it behaves the same as |
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This convention has been adopted by 1993 for Arabic and 1994 for Hebrew | Romanization of the Hebrew alphabet Thesis |
Cornell Studies in Political Economy.
20Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, The Mute Immortals Speak: Pre-Islamic Poetry and the Poetics of Ritual, pg | Albright, The Proto-Sinaitic Inscriptions and their Decipherment 1966 , "Schematic Table of Proto-Sinaitic Characters" |
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Other variants chosen [ ] to represent ayin as a full grapheme rather than a sign suggestive of an apostrophe or a diacritic :• Ayin is also one of the three letters that can take a furtive patach ganuv | Media related to at Wikimedia Commons |
The sound represented by ayin is common to much of the , such as in the , the and the.
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