Sounds Related to the Holy Name in Ancient Hebrew

Regarding the form of the Holy Name as "Yahweh", some have claimed that there was no “W” sound in Hebrew. However, most often it is claimed and stated as though fact that there was no "V" sound in ancient Hebrew. In reality, no one on earth today knows for a certainty what the ancient Hebrew sounded like, and scripturally it does not matter whether there was or was not a "w" or "v" sound in ancient Hebrew. Both sounds exist in English. The reality is that we today cannot be certain what sound(s) were attached the letter often referred to as "Vav/Waw".

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waw_(letter)

Many place a lot of emphasis on the Masoretic vowel points for claims of how the Holy Name should be pronounced. We should note that these vowel points were added several centuries after Christ and after Biblical Hebrew had become a dead language. No word at all in the original Hebrew had any written vowels or vowel points; vowel sounds were spoken, but not written. What sounds that the Masoretes assigned to the vowel pointing may or may not correctly represent the original Hebrew sounds. Additionally, we cannot be fully certain as to what sounds the Masoretes attribued to the vowel point. Indeed, several different methods of transliteration of the vowel points have been devised. Therefore, any English phonemes that are offered by any transliteration method may or may not correctly represent the sounds that the Masoretes intended, which, even if we did know for a certainty the phonemes that the Masoretes intended, we do not know that the Masoretes actually knew what the original Hebrew sounded like.

What we do have are various conflicting theories, each of which is often presented as though fact, relating to how this or that sounded by use of this or that English/Latin phoneme. For instance, the beginning "YOD/JOD", may have sounded in ancient Hebrew similar to the beginning "J" in the name Jacques. Nevertheless, the original Hebrew had no written vowels. Additionally, the Masoretic vowel pointing system did not exist until several centuries after Christ. Those "vowel points" did not exist in ancient Hebrew.
www.hebrew4christians.com/Grammar/Unit_Two/Introduction/introduction.html

In Bible times, however, names, when rendered from one language to another, often were adapted to the sounds of the target language, which caused names to be pronounced differently in almost every language. Thus, in the Bible itself, the same name may be given with various spellings and pronunciations.

Regarding the English form, “Yahweh”, this form is based on what someone believed the Holy Name sounded like in Koine Greek. The English form “Jehovah” is based on the Masoretic Hebrew text.

On theory is that the pronunciation of the Holy Name, as taken into the Greek, did NOT come from the assigning of written vowels to the Hebrew, since Hebrew did not have any written vowels, but simply according to the way it sounded (since there were no written Hebrew vowels at that time), and as adapted into the Greek, it was transliterated into English/Latin as IAOUE, which was shortened to IAUE, since the "O" sound became relatively silent. It was from this latter IAUE, that the English form "Yahweh" was developed, which some have claimed to have been the original pronunciation of God's Holy Name.

There is also a theory that the Koine Greek had a consonantal "I" sound similar to the "J" in the name Jacques, or the beginning "Y" sound as found in several Spanish dialects.

At any rate, both Yahweh and Jehovah are commonly accepted renderings of the Holy Name in English, regardless of how the Holy Name was originally pronounced in Hebrew, just as Joshua, Jeshua, Jesus and Yeshua are all commonly accepted renderings (in English) of the name given to the Messiah. Nevertheless, it is highly doubtful that any of the verbalizations that we give in English to any of these forms actually represent how the name sounded in ancient Biblical Hebrew.

The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob has never told us that we had to pronounce His Name or any other name as they were originally pronounced in Hebrew; if so, then we are all lost since all we have are various theories of men, based on assumptions, as to how any name in ancient Hebrew actually was originally pronounced. The idea that one has to pronounce the Holy Name as it was originally pronounced in ancient Hebrew comes from man, not from God. God has not given any command that his holy Name, or any other Biblical name, has to be pronounced in every language exactly as it was originally pronounced in ancient Hebrew.

See my studies:
The Holy Name in the Original Hebrew/Greek
nameofyah.blogspot.com/2020/03/heb-grk.html

Did God's People in the Old Testament Times Utter the Holy Name Aloud?
nameofyah.blogspot.com/2017/04/utter.html