Ayin

Ayin (also ayn or ain; transliterated ⟨ʿ⟩) is the sixteenth letter of the Semitic scripts, including Phoenician ʿayin 𐤏, Hebrew ʿayin ע‎, Aramaic ʿē 𐡏, Syriac ʿē ܥ, and Arabic ʿayn ع‎ (where it is sixteenth in abjadi order only).^{[note 1]} It is related to the Ancient North Arabian 𐪒‎‎, South Arabian 𐩲, and Ge'ez ዐ.

The letter represents a voiced pharyngeal fricative (/ʕ/) or a similarly articulated consonant. In some Semitic languages and dialects, the phonetic value of the letter has changed, or the phoneme has been lost altogether. In the revived Modern Hebrew it is reduced to a glottal stop or is omitted entirely, in part due to Ashkenazi European influence and their difficulty in pronouncing the consonant.^{[citation needed]}

The Phoenician letter is the origin of the Greek, Latin and Cyrillic letters O, O and O. It is also the origin of the Armenian letters Ո and Օ.

The Arabic character is the origin of the Latin-script letter Ƹ.
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