»digamma

The digamma is an alphabetic character to which I am especially and sentimentally attached; I first came across it my first week at College, in Hardy Hansen's and the late Gerald M. Quinn's "Greek: An Intensive Course" (some info. available through Google Books).

[ a brief tussle with the six-year-old bundle of twine that holds together the code producing this blog ]

I especially liked Ϝ because it explained how οινος became wine: the initial labio-velar consonant had disappeared a few centuries before the Golden Age of Athens, but the whooshing sound remained in the aspiration of the initial omicron. I thought of the digamma when looking at the katakana character ヲ, which represents a "wo" sound. The digamma more closely corresponds to other Mediterranean languages, such as the Arabic و and the Hebrew ו (vav or waw sound; I think the و has no fricative articulation). ... I don't know phonetics. I do enjoy disappearing things in literature, like characters and consonants.