Семит әліпбиінің бесінші әрпі және "He" таңбасының тарихы

Fifth letter of many Semitic alphabets
the English pronoun
the Japanese letter

He is the fifth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician hē 𐤄, Hebrew hē ה, Aramaic hē 𐡄, Syriac hē ܗ, and Arabic hāʾ ه. Its sound value is the voiceless glottal fricative
The proto Canaanite letter gave rise to the Greek Epsilon Ε ε, Etruscan 𐌄, Latin E, Ë and Ɛ, and Cyrillic Е, Ё, Є, Э, and Ҩ. He, like all Phoenician letters, represented a consonant, but the Latin, Greek and Cyrillic equivalents have all come to represent vowel sounds.

In Proto Northwest Semitic there were still three voiceless fricatives: uvular , glottal , and pharyngeal In the Wadi el Hol script, these appear to be expressed by derivatives of the following Egyptian hieroglyphs V28 "thread",
A28 "jubilation", compare South Arabian , , , Ge'ez ሀ, ሐ, ኀ, and O6 "court". In the Phoenician alphabet, and are merged into Heth "fence", while is replaced by He "window".

In modern Hebrew, the letter represents a voiceless glottal fricative , and may also be dropped, although this pronunciation is seen as substandard. Also, in many variant Hebrew pronunciations the letter may represent a glottal stop. In word final position, Hei is used to indicate an a vowel, usually that of qamatz ( 1=ָ ), and in this sense functions like Aleph, Vav, and Yud as a mater lectionis, indicating the presence of a long vowel. Hei, along with Aleph, Ayin, Reish, and Khet, cannot receive a dagesh. Nonetheless, it does receive a marking identical to the dagesh, to form Hei mappiq (הּ). Although indistinguishable for most modern speakers or readers of Hebrew, the mapiq is placed in a word final Hei to indicate that the letter is not merely a mater lectionis but the consonant should be aspirated in that position. It is generally used in Hebrew to indicate the third person feminine singular genitive marker. Today, such a pronunciation only occurs in religious contexts and even then often only by careful readers of the scriptures.

He is often used to represent the name of God as an abbreviation for Hashem, which means The Name and is a way of saying God without actually saying the name of God (YHWH). In print, Hashem is usually written as Hei with a geresh: ה׳.