Hwair

The name of the Gothic letter is recorded by Alcuin in Codex Vindobonensis 795 as uuaer.

ƕairnei "skull");[2] comparative reconstruction shows *kʷer- (“a kind of dish or pot”) in Proto-Indo-European.

Gothic ƕ is the reflex of Common Germanic *xʷ, which in turn continues the Indo-European labiovelar *kʷ after it underwent Grimm's law.

The Gothic letter is transliterated with the Latin ligature of the same name, ƕ, which was introduced by Wilhelm Braune in the 1882 edition of Gotische Grammatik[3], as suggested in a review of the 1880 edition by Hermann Collitz[4], to replace the digraph hv which was formerly used to express the phoneme, e.g. by Migne (vol.

It was also used to represent the voiceless labial–velar fricative [ʍ] in a 1921 edition of the International Phonetic Alphabet.