Tau gallicum, or D with short stroke overlay in

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

, (

majuscule Letter case is the distinction between the letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals (more formally '' majuscule'') and smaller lowercase (more formally '' minuscule'') in the written representation of certain languages. The writing syste ...

: Ꟈ (

minuscule Letter case is the distinction between the letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals (more formally ''majuscule'') and smaller lowercase (more formally '' minuscule'') in the written representation of certain languages. The writing system ...

: ꟈ (

)) is a letter that was used to write the

Gaulish language Gaulish is an extinct Celtic language spoken in parts of Continental Europe before and during the period of the Roman Empire. In the narrow sense, Gaulish was the language of the Celts of Gaul (now France, Luxembourg, Belgium, most of Switzerl ...

.Proposal for the addition of four Latin characters to the UCS

Michael Everson Michael Everson (born January 1963) is an American and Irish linguistics, linguist, Character encoding, script encoder, typesetting, typesetter, type designer and Publishing, publisher. He runs a publishing company called Evertype, through which ...

and Chris Lilley, 2019. It is a D with the horizontal bar from the Greek letter Θ. It likely represented a or sound, like the ts in cats or the st in stop.

Name

The Latin phrase literally means " Gallic

tau Tau (; uppercase Τ, lowercase τ or \boldsymbol\tau; ) is the nineteenth letter of the Greek alphabet, representing the voiceless alveolar plosive, voiceless dental or alveolar plosive . In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 300 ...

". The only known mention of the letter is found in

Catalepton The ''Appendix Vergiliana'' is a collection of Latin poems traditionally ascribed as being the juvenilia (work written as a youth) of Virgil (70–19 BC).Régine ChambertVergil's Epicureanism in his early poems in "Vergil, Philodemus, and the Au ...

, a set of epigrams attributed to

Virgil Publius Vergilius Maro (; 15 October 70 BC21 September 19 BC), usually called Virgil or Vergil ( ) in English, was an ancient Rome, ancient Roman poet of the Augustan literature (ancient Rome), Augustan period. He composed three of the most fa ...

and collected after his death in

Appendix Vergiliana The ''Appendix Vergiliana'' is a collection of Latin poems traditionally ascribed as being the juvenilia (work written as a youth) of Virgil (70–19 BC).Régine ChambertVergil's Epicureanism in his early poems in "Vergil, Philodemus, and the Aug ...

. The second epigram contains the following text: It is not known, however, whether the sound described by

is the same as that for which the term is currently used.

Letter

After using the

Greek alphabet The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BC. It was derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and is the earliest known alphabetic script to systematically write vowels as wel ...

, the

Gauls The Gauls (; , ''Galátai'') were a group of Celts, Celtic peoples of mainland Europe in the Iron Age Europe, Iron Age and the Roman Gaul, Roman period (roughly 5th century BC to 5th century AD). Their homeland was known as Gaul (''Gallia''). Th ...

adopted the

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet, also known as the Roman alphabet, is the collection of letters originally used by the Ancient Rome, ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered except several letters splitting—i.e. from , and from � ...

to transcribe their language. However, to note a sound unknown to the second, they introduced the additional letter tau gallicum, said to have been inspired by the Greek letter Θ (

theta Theta (, ) uppercase Θ or ; lowercase θ or ; ''thē̂ta'' ; Modern: ''thī́ta'' ) is the eighth letter of the Greek alphabet, derived from the Phoenician letter Teth 𐤈. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 9. Gree ...

). Its spelling is varies between and . The letter can be found in the initial of the name of the Celtic goddess Sirona, whose name is written as: ''Sirona'', ''Ꟈirona'' or ''Thirona'', highlighting the difficulty of noting the initial sound in the Latin alphabet. The letter is also present in the lead of Chamalières, a lead tablet discovered in 1971 in

Chamalières Chamalières (; Auvergnat: ) is a commune in the Puy-de-Dôme department, Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, central France. With 17,276 inhabitants (2019), Chamalières is the fourth-largest town in the department. It lies adjacent to the west of Clermo ...

and written in the Gallic language with Latin cursive letters: snIeꟈꟈdic, aꟈꟈedillI.

Pronunciation

The precise value of the sound transcribed by the Gallic tau is not known. It is supposed that it denotes an alveolar affricate , in free variation with in initial position.

Use on computers

The letter is encoded into

as and respectively.

References

{{Latin script, D , show diacritic = stroke , show letter = , show pairs = no D stroke Palaeography