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.

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".

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