Teth

Teth, also written as or Tet, is the ninth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician Ṭēt , Hebrew
Tēt , Aramaic Ṭēth , Syriac Ṭēṯ ܛ, and Arabic . It is the 16th letter of the modern Arabic alphabet. The Persian ṭa is pronounced as a hard "t" sound and is the 19th letter in the modern Persian alphabet. The Phoenician letter also gave rise to the Greek theta (), originally an aspirated voiceless dental stop but now used for the voiceless dental fricative. The Arabic letter (ط) is sometimes transliterated as ''tah'' in English, for example in Arabic script in Unicode.

The sound value of Teth is , one of the Semitic emphatic consonants.

Origins

The Phoenician letter name may mean "spinning wheel" pictured as (compare Hebrew root ט-ו-י meaning 'spinning' (a thread) which begins with Teth). According to another hypothesis (Brian Colless), the letter possibly continues a Middle Bronze Age glyph named 'good', Aramaic טַב 'tav', Hebrew 'tov', Syriac ܛܒܐ 'tava', modern Arabic ṭayyib''', all of identical meaning, whose picture is based on the '' Nefer'' 'good' hieroglyph common in ancient Egyptian names (e.g. Nefertiti):

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Jewish scripture books about the "holy letters" from the 10th century onward discuss the connection or origin of the letter Teth with the word ''tov'' "good".
This was especially emphasized ever since the late 1600s after the Baal Shem Tov became influential, since the letter Teth was in his Acronym standing for Tov, and goodness was part of his philosophy.
The acrostic poems of the Bible use 'Tov' to represent the letter (e.g. Psalm 119:65-72).

Arabic ṭāʾ

The letter is named ' طَاءْ; Modern Standard Arabic pronunciation: .

Hebrew Tet

The Hebrew spelling of name of the letter:

Hebrew pronunciation

In Modern Hebrew, Tet represents a voiceless alveolar plosive , and is therefore usually homophonic with the abjad's final letter, Tav ת. However, Tet can be pharyngealized to produce in traditional Temani and Sephardi pronunciation.

Significance

In gematria, Tet represents the number nine. When followed by an apostrophe, it means 9,000. The most common example of this usage is in the numbers of the Hebrew years (e.g., in numbers would be the date 9754).

As well, in gematria, the number 15 is written with Tet and Vav, (9+6) to avoid the normal construction Yud and Hei (10+5) which spells a name of God. Similarly, 16 is written with Tet and Zayin (9+7) instead of Yud and Vav (10+6) to avoid spelling part of the Tetragrammaton.

Tet is also one of the seven letters which receive special crowns (called '' tagin'') when written in a Sefer Torah. See Shin, Ayin, Gimmel, Nun, Zayin, and Tzadi.

Similar symbols

A symbol similar to the Phoenician teth is used for the tensor product, as $\otimes$, but this is presumably an independent development, by modification of the multiplication sign ×. The Hebrew is also visually similar to the letter Ʋ.

Character encodings

References

External links

{{Northwest Semitic abjad
Phoenician alphabet
Arabic letters
Hebrew letters