On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 12:37 PM, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
No. The letters on the globe roughly equate to "w" or "wi"
The Hebrew letter is a resh ("R" sound), and the Greek one is a capital omega with smooth breathing (in ancient Greek a long "O" sound, today a long "I" sound). Doing a little research, the Cyrillic is a "Y" sound. The Japanese is the modern katakana representation of "wi". The Chinese character I have no idea how to look up, but apparently it means "ancestor". I don't recognize the writing system that the one below it represents. The rest are at an angle and I can't even make out their shapes properly.
But anyway, the letters certainly don't all represent "w" sounds. The Hebrew should be a vav or double-vav, if that were the case. The closest equivalents in both Greek and Cyrillic (neither of which has a "W" sound, I'm pretty sure) apparently both look exactly like a capital B, admittedly, at least to judge by their Wikipedias' names, so their current versions might be the most suitable if that were the goal. But I don't think that the goal was specifically to make them "W" sounds.