From The Hebrew Alphabet...

The Hebrew Alphabet Letter He

The fifth letter in many of the Semitic alphabets including Hebrew is He. The sound value of He is a voiceless glottal ficative. A "fricative" is a kind of sound that is used in some spoken languages that can either behave like a consonant or a vowel. At other times it seems to be neutral in its behavior.

In Modern Hebrew, the letter He depicts a voiceless glottal fricative. There are many variants in Hebrew pronunciations where the letter He may represent a glottal stop. He is used to indicate the a-vowel in a word-final position. In this sense, He functions like Vav, Aleph, Yud and also as a mater lectionis which indicates that a long vowel is present.

Hei is not able to receive a dagesh. It is, however, able to receive a marking that is identical to the dagesh which forms Hei-mappiq.

He symbolizes the number five in gematria. When this letter is used at the beginning of Hebrew years, then it means 5000.

When Hei is attached to words, it may have three possible meanings:

- A preposition that has the meaning of "that", "who" or "the".
- A prefix which means that the sentence acts like a question.
- When Hie is used after place names, it acts like a suffix that indicates movement towards the given noun.

In Modern Hebrew, the fifth letter can appear in three distinct forms: book print, cursive and manual print. It would be good to learn all three ways to write He as you never know where you may run into it.

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