Hwair (also , , ) is the name of , the Gothic letter expressing the or sound (reflected in English by the inverted wh-spelling for ). Hwair is also the name of the Latin ligature (capital ) used to transcribe Gothic. Name The name of the Gothic letter is recorded by Alcuin in Codex Vindobonensis 795 as uuaer. The meaning of the name was probably "cauldron, pot" (cf. "skull"); comparative reconstruction shows *kʷer- (“a kind of dish or pot”) in Proto-Indo-European. There was no Elder Futhark rune for the phoneme, so that unlike those of most Gothic letters, the name does not continue the name of a rune (but see qairþra). Sound Gothic is the reflex of Common Germanic , which in turn continues the Indo-European labiovelar * after it underwent Grimm's law. The same phoneme in Old English and Old High German is spelled hw. Transliteration The Gothic letter is transliterated with the Latin ligature of the same name, , which was introduced by philologists around 1900 to replace the digraph hv, which was formerly used to express the phoneme, e.g. by Migne (vol. 18) in the 1860s. It is used, for example, in Dania transcription. Related letters and other similar characters : IPA letter Bilabial click Ԋ ԋ : Komi Nje, a letter in the Molodtsov alphabet Ꙩ ꙩ : Cyrillic letter Monocular O ん : N (kana) Խ խ : Armenian Khe Computing codes Note that the Unicode names of the Latin letters are different: "Hwair" and "Hv". See also Phonological history of wh Wh (digraph) References Latin-script letters Palaeography Gothic writing