User talk:2601:49:8400:FB40:D025:7C60:136A:12FD

Yes, I tried to make a similar point earlier. Here is an excerpt from Hamilton (2006, p. 91), The Origins of the West Semitic Alphabet in Egyptian Scripts:

"While *waw- may have stemmed from an archaic noun that is now lost, the morphology of this letter name makes me suspicious that it may have been an ad hoc creation. On the one hand, *waw- is an archaic formation inasmuch as it violates a basic rule of West Semitic phonology, that almost all initial-w words became first-y (Bauer and Leander 1922: 229m-q; HALOT 1: 257).91 A West Semitic cognate noun should have the form *yaw or *yô. The often-cited cognate, wawîm/n in Biblical and Mishnaic Hebrew and Jewish Aramaic, is thus suspect on phonological grounds. Although that noun is trans- lated “hooks, pins, or pegs” (BDB 255) or “nails, pegs” (HALOT I: 259), all biblical occurrences stem from one context in Exodus: the hooks from which the curtains are suspended in the 'ohel mô'eµd (HALOT I: 259). That meaning correlates closely with shapes of the letter waw at any time after its head begins in late second millennium B.C. scripts. It seems more likely, therefore, that the rarely attested noun *waw- was generated from this letter’s name (and developed shape) and not vice versa (similarly, Hallo 2004: 286; cf. delta in Greek and delet in Jer 36:23 [BDB, 195]). The only information that wawîm/n communicates is that the Masoretes pointed it as a *qal- and not *qall- nominal form. On the other hand, one may find no etymology for *waw- because it may have been an early ad hoc creation on the pat- tern of acrophonic consonant-vowel or diphthong-same consonant, as in mêm/mîm (and nûn in most languages). Rhyming with taµw may have also played a part in this possible creation, which must be dated" "to the second millennium B.C. because of the lengthened derivative"

The anachronistic "nail" interpretation is also favored by various Christian groups because it turns the Tetragrammaton into a prophecy of the crucifixion (i.e., YHWH = "hand -- Praise! -- nail -- Praise!"

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