Ayn, and a Second Consonant That Vanished Into It

Ayn wrote a pharyngeal consonant in the classical language, the sound behind the Hebrew ayin, the Syriac letter of the same value and the Arabic ayn. The name is the inherited Semitic one, and the correspondence is straightforward.

What is less obvious is that this letter absorbed a second consonant. Proto-Semitic is reconstructed with a voiced velar fricative beside the pharyngeal, a sound Arabic still writes separately as ghayn. Ge'ez merged it into ayn. So did Hebrew, and the merger there can be dated by transcriptions: the place name Gaza and the name Gomorrah both begin with ayin in Hebrew and were rendered into Greek with a g, which only makes sense if the older Hebrew still had the velar sound when those renderings were made.

That gives a rare fixed point. Most Semitic sound changes are dated by comparison alone, and here a transcription into another alphabet catches one in progress. The Ge'ez merger cannot be dated the same way, because no comparable body of early transcription exists, and the atlas records the merger without a date rather than borrowing the Hebrew one.

In the received Ethiopian reading tradition ayn and alf have fallen together as well. Tigrinya still distinguishes them; Amharic does not.