He is the fifth letter of many
Semitic alphabets, including
Phoenician 
,
Aramaic,
Hebrew ,
Syriac and
Arabic . Its sound value is a
voiceless glottal fricative (
).
The Phoenician letter gave rise to the
Greek Epsilon,
Etruscan 
,
Latin
E and
Cyrillic
Ye. He, like all Phoenician letters,
represented a
consonant, but the Latin,
Greek and Cyrillic equivalents have all come to represent
vowel sounds.
Origins
In Proto-
West Semitic there were still
three voiceless fricatives, uvular glottal and pharyngeal . In the
Wadi el-Hol script, these appear
to be expressed by derivatives of V28 "thread",A28
hillul "jubilation", compare
South Arabian 
,
,
,
Ge'ez
ሀ,
ሐ,
ኀ, and O6 "court". In the
Proto-Canaanite alphabet, and are
merged into
Heth "fence", while is
replaced by He "window".
Hebrew Hei
Pronunciation
In
modern Hebrew, the letter
represents a
voiceless
glottal fricative. may also be dropped, although this
pronunciation is seen as substandard.
Also, in many variant Hebrew pronunciations the letter may
represent a glottal stop. In word-final position, He is used to
indicate an
a-vowel, usually that of qamatz (ָ ), and in
this sense functions like
Aleph,
Vav and
Yud as a
mater lectionis, indicating the presence of
a long vowel.
Hei, along with
Aleph,
Ayin,
Resh, and
Heth, cannot receive a
dagesh. Nonetheless, it does receive a marking
identical to the dagesh, to form Hei-
mappiq
(הּ). Although indistinguishable for most modern speakers or
readers of Hebrew, the mapiq is placed in a word-final Hei to
indicate that the letter is not merely a mater lectionis, but that
the consonant should be aspirated in that position. It is generally
used in Hebrew to indicate the third-person feminine singular
genitive marker. Today such a pronunciation only occurs in
religious contexts, and then often only by careful readers of the
scriptures.
Significance of Hei
In
gematria, Hei symbolizes the number
five, and when used at the beginning of
Hebrew years, it means 5000 (i.e. התשנ״ד in
numbers would be the
date 5754).
Attached to words, Hei may have three possible meanings:
- A preposition meaning "the", "that",
or "who" (as in "A boy who reads"). For example,
yeled - a boy, Hayeled - the
boy.
- A prefix indicating that the sentence is a question. (For
example, Yadata - You knew,
Hayadata? - Did
you know?)
- A suffix after place names indicating movement towards the
given noun. (For example, Yerushalayim -
Jerusalem
, Yerushalaym'ah - towards
Jerusalem.)
Hei, representing five in gematria, is often found on amulets,
symbolizing the five fingers of a hand,
a very
common talismanic symbol.
In Judaism
Hei is often used to represent the name of God, as He stands for
Hashem,
which means
The Name and is a way of saying 'God' without
actually saying the name of God. In print, Hashem is usually
written as Hei with a
chupchik
(apostrophe): 'ה.
At the
seder, during
Yachatz
there is a tradition to break the
matzah into
the shape of the letter Hei.
Syriac He
In the
Syriac alphabet, the fifth
letter is — He ( ). It is pronounced as a [
h. At the end of a word with a
point above it, it represents the
third-person feminine singular suffix.
Without the point, it stands for the masculine equivalent. Standing
alone with a horizontal line above it, it is the
abbreviation for either
hānau ( ),
meaning 'this is' or 'that is', or
halelûya ( ). As a numeral, He represents
the number five.
Arabic hāʾ
The letter is named
hāʾ, and is written is several ways
depending on its position in the word:
Hāʾ is used as a suffix (with the
harakat dictated by
ʾIʿrab) indicating
possession, indicating that the
noun marked with the suffix belongs to a specific
masculine possessor; for example, كتاب
kitāb ("book") becomes كتابه
kitābuhu ("his
book") with the addition of final
hāʾ; the possessor is
implied in the suffix. A longer example, هو يقرأ كتابه, (
huwa
yaqraʼu kitābahu, "he reads his book") more clearly indicates
the possessor.
The
hāʾ suffix appended to a verb represents a masculine
object (e.g. يقرأه,
yaqraʾuhu, "he reads it").
The feminine form of this construction is in both cases ـها
-hā.
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