Q.   Which is the correct spelling of the Name, Yahweh or Yahveh?

A.  The spelling YAHWEH has been accepted by most scholars as the proper spelling of the Heavenly Father’s name.  Edward Horowitz explains in his book, “How the Hebrew Language Grew” that the letters making up Yahweh’s name [Y H W H] are all weak letters. On pages 29-30 we read under “WEAK LETTER W”:
            “That the second of the weak letters is w may surprise you – for it doesn’t sound weak at all – and actually w is not a weak sound.  The answer is that the sound of w a long time ago wasn’t ‘vav’ at all but ‘w’ and ‘w’ is weak.  It drops out of large numbers of English words – that is, in those words the ‘w’ appears in the spelling but remains unpronounced, which usually means it was pronounced at one time but is now silent.  Some of the words are ‘answer, sword, law, two, write’ etc. “Vav” or rather “waw” used to be the sixth letter of the Greek alphabet) as it is of the Hebrew).  It died completely out of the Greek language, leaving only one trace behind: in poetry there is an empty space where there once used to be a sound.
            “The Yemenite Jews of Arabia who retain an ancient correct and pure pronunciation of Hebrew still pronounce the w as ‘w’ – as does Arabic, the close sister language of Hebrew.  Incidentally, it is fascinating to listen to the Yemenite ceremonial reading of the Pentateuch.  They not only pronounce w as “waw” but distinguish between a d with a dagesh and a d without.  The soft of undageshed d equals a hard ‘Th’ in English, such as in the word ‘the’ or ‘this.’  They also differentiate between a dageshed and an undageshed g.  The former is equivalent to an English soft ‘g’ as in the name ‘George’.  Their undageshed or soft n is equivalent to the English soft ‘Th’ as in the word Sabbath.  English words that derive from the Hebrew have this soft ‘th’ or the Hebrew letter ‘n’ without a dagesh.”

 
                   
         
     
                   
               
                         
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