Ayin

By: Morris Jastrow, Jr., Gerson B. Levi

The sixteenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Its numerical value is seventy. In its earlier form it was a circle, a rude picture of the eye, hence its name ("'Ayin" = "eye"). This form is still to be seen on the Moabite Stone, and also on the old Hebrew inscription found in the Siloam Pool. Its pronunciation in modern time ranges from no sound at all, as in the Judæo-German pronunciation, to the nasal ng of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews. One reason for this wide range in pronunciation is that there were originally two distinct sounds in Hebrew, as in other Semitic languages, both represented by an 'Ayin: the one a rough breathing (still retained in Morocco and Syria), the other a soft palatal. The distinction between the two, still indicated in the transliteration of proper names in the Greek version of the Old Testament, was gradually lost; in certain districts the Jews retained in their pronunciation traces of the palatal (which accounts for the Sephardic pronunciation), in others all traces of the letter disappeared, and the rough breathing became purely vocalic (see Zimmern, "Vergleichende Grammatik der Semitischen Sprachen," § 7). The letter 'Ayin, along with the Aleph, Waw, and Yod, has been used quite extensively in the Yiddish orthography as a vowel letter, indicating short e.

a´yēn: עין, ‛ayı̄n, “eye” or “fountain”: The 16th letter of the Hebrew alphabet, so named, probably, because the original form resembled the eye. ‛Ayin (ע) is usually neglected in pronunciation, and inverted comma (() is the sign most commonly employed to represent it in transliteration. The same sound is found in the Arabic and other Semitic languages. The Arabs have two pronunciations, one a very strong guttural formed at the back of the palate, something like a rattled “r” or “rg,” the other similar in quality, only less harsh and guttural. The Septuagint reproduced the ‛ayin (ע) in some cases by the Greek letter gamma (γ).”The numerical value of this letter is 70. An ‛ayin (ע) begins each verse of the 16th section of Ps 119 in the Hebrew.