Ւ's tumble toward obscurity, a sad fate for such a fine letter.

Ւ (hyun) is the 34th letter of the Armenian alphabet. Its independent role has essentially disappeared from the reformed Armenian orthography via the Soviet Union but its obscurity hides some fascinating details

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At its inception, the phonetic alphabet that Mesrop Mashtots created in the 5th century, largely reflecting Greek influence, had 36 letters, but just as in Greek, the vowel u (the u in rule) was formed from a diagraph of two letters, ου, and ու followed the Greek model.

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As part of the diagraph that formed ου, ւ was equivalent to the Greek upsilon υ, also pronounced as hy in some forms of Greek (Ionian?). Upsilon itself is derived from the Phoenician letter waw. This is where things become intriguing and speculative.

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I'm no linguist but to me, it appears that Ւ/ւ went through a sound change quite early before the dialectical Eastern/Western Armenian split. It essentially became phonetically indistinguishable from the Armenian letter վ; v.

Another Mashtots era pronunciation clue....

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Originally, the 11th century additional letter օ, the 37th letter of the modern Armenian alphabet, was non existent and words that now begin with օ, such as օր (day) began with աւր, աւ=օ via a soundshift again, before the major Eastern/Western dialectical split.

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So using ու & աւ as clues, it appears that classical Armenian may have had a semi-vowel close to the w, perhaps a sound between w and v; w/v. So հաւ (chicken), may have been pronounced closer to haw than hav as in nearly all modern dialects.

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This leaves us with the ligature և, the 37th "letter" in the reformed orthography, & by speculating on how it may have been pronounced in the past, yew isn't that outlandish a classical phonetic translation. In fact, w is often utilized in transliteration of ւ into English

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Finally, an interesting but related tidbit is the Georgian letter უ, u. It was initially a diagraph, similar to the Greek ου & Armenian ու, but in Georgian, the two equivalent letters merged between the 5th-8th centuries.

Hopefully, some of you linguists can help correct me

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