is rare in modern Hebrew, where this word usually means "(a delivered) speech" and is regularly spelled with shuruk - נְאוּם. The name יְהוֹשֻׁעַ ('Joshua', ) is spelled with kubutz in the Bible, but usually יְהוֹשׁוּעַ in modern Hebrew. In the first decades of the revival of the Hebrew language it was common in spelling without niqqud not to write the vav in words which were written with kubutz. For example, in the printed works of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda the word מרבה may mean מְרֻבֶּה ('multiplied', ) and מַרְבֶּה ('multiplying', ). This practice disappeared in the middle of twentieth century and now מְרֻבֶּה is written מרובה and מַרְבֶּה is written מרבה. Pronunciation In Biblical Hebrew both signs may have indicated the same sound and when the Bible manuscripts were vocalized kubutz was simply used where the letter vav was not written, although other possibilities were proposed by researchers, most commonly that the vowels had different length (quantity), kubutz being shorter, or that the signs indicated different sounds (quality), kubutz being more rounded, although this is a matter of debate. It is also possible that Biblical Hebrew had several varieties of sounds, which were not consistently represented in writing. Shuruk is usually a reflection of reconstructed Proto-Semitic long (ū) sound, although most likely in the Bible kubutz stands for it when the letter vav is not written. Kubutz is one of the reflections of the short Proto-Semitic short (ŭ) sound. Kamatz katan is a variant of kubutz in the Bible, as they are found in complementary distribution in closely related morphological patterns. In modern Hebrew, both signs indicate the phoneme , a close back rounded vowel. Its closest equivalent in English is the "oo" sound in tool. It is transliterated as a "u". In modern Hebrew writing without niqqud the sound is always written as waw, in which case it is considered a mater lectionis. The following table contains the pronunciation of the kubutz and shuruk in reconstructed historical forms and dialects using the International Phonetic Alphabet. Vowel length comparison These vowels lengths are not manifested in modern Hebrew. In addition, the short u is usually promoted to a long u in Israeli writing for the sake of disambiguation. Unicode encoding See also Niqqud References Niqqud