Heth

Heth, sometimes written as Chet or Ḥet, is the eighth letter of the Semitic abjads. This includes the Phoenician ḥēt 𐤇, the Hebrew ḥēt ח‎, the Aramaic ḥēṯ 𐡇, the Syriac ḥēṯ ܚ, and the Arabic ḥāʾ ح‎. It is also connected to the Ancient North Arabian 𐪂‎‎‎, the South Arabian 𐩢, and the Ge'ez ሐ.

Originally, Heth represented a voiceless fricative sound, either pharyngeal /ħ/ or velar /x/. In Arabic, two letters were created for these sounds: the unmodified ḥāʾ ح for /ħ/, and ḫāʾ خ for /x/.

The Phoenician letter influenced many other writing systems. It led to the Greek eta Η, the Etruscan letter, the Latin H, and the Cyrillic И. While H is a consonant in Latin, in Greek and Cyrillic it represents a vowel sound. This change happened because the letter was originally a consonant in Greek and later evolved into the rough breathing character. The Phoenician letter also inspired the archaic Greek letter heta and a variant of the Cyrillic letter I, called short I. The Arabic letter ح is sometimes written as Ch in English.

Origins

The letter Ḥet likely comes from an ancient Egyptian symbol. One idea is that it started from a symbol for "courtyard." In Hebrew, a word meaning "courtyard" also starts with Ḥet. Another idea is that it came from a symbol for "thread" or "wick," which shows a twisted piece of flax.

The letter is often written as ḥ, with a small dot under the h. Sometimes, people use a capital Ch to represent it in writing.

Arabic ḥāʾ

See also: خ

The letter is named حَاءْ ḥāʾ and is the sixth letter of the Arabic alphabet. Its shape changes depending on where it appears in a word. In some positions, it looks a bit like a bird’s beak.

This special letter is used along with two others, which are ḫāʾ and ǧīm. In the Maltese language, the letter that matches ح is written as ħ.

Pronunciation

In Arabic, ḥāʾ sounds similar to the English h, but it is a bit rougher. In Persian, it sounds just like the English h.

Hebrew het

Pronunciation

In modern Israeli Hebrew and Ashkenazi Hebrew, the letter Ḥet (חֵית) usually sounds like a voiceless uvular fricative (/χ/). This happened because the sounds of Ḥet and Khaf merged over time.

Some Israeli Arabs and Mizrahi Jews, especially older people and popular Mizrahi singers like Yemenites, still use the original sound (/ħ/).

In gematria, Ḥet stands for the number eight.

In chat rooms, online forums, and social media, repeating the letter Ḥet (חחחחחחחחח) is a way to show laughter, similar to saying "Haha" in English.

Syriac cheth

The letter Heth is an important part of many ancient writing systems. In Syriac, it is called ḥēṯ and looks like ܚ. This letter comes from even older languages and helps us understand how people wrote and spoke a long time ago.

Character encodings

The letter Heth is the eighth letter in several ancient writing systems. These include the Phoenician ḥēt 𐤇, Hebrew ḥēt ח‎, Aramaic ḥēṯ 𐡇, Syriac ḥēṯ ܚ, and Arabic ḥāʾ ح‎. It is also connected to writing systems like Ancient North Arabian 𐪂‎‎‎, South Arabian 𐩢, and Ge'ez ሐ.

Originally, Heth made a soft hissing sound, either like the "ch" in the Scottish word "loch" /ħ/ or like the "ch" in the German word "Bach" /x/.