Teth, also written as or Tet, is the ninth letter of the

Semitic abjads An abjad ( or abgad) is a writing system in which only consonants are represented, leaving the vowel sounds to be inferred by the reader. This contrasts with alphabets, which provide graphemes for both consonants and vowels. The term was introd ...

, including Phoenician ''ṭēt'' 𐤈,

Hebrew Hebrew (; ''ʿÎbrit'') is a Northwest Semitic languages, Northwest Semitic language within the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family. A regional dialect of the Canaanite languages, it was natively spoken by the Israelites and ...

Aramaic Aramaic (; ) is a Northwest Semitic language that originated in the ancient region of Syria and quickly spread to Mesopotamia, the southern Levant, Sinai, southeastern Anatolia, and Eastern Arabia, where it has been continually written a ...

''ṭēṯ'' 𐡈, and Syriac ''ṭēṯ'' ܛ, and

Arabic Arabic (, , or , ) is a Central Semitic languages, Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) assigns lang ...

''ṭāʾ'' . It is also related to the

Ancient North Arabian Languages and scripts in the 1st Century Arabia Ancient North Arabian (ANA) is a collection of scripts and a language or family of languages under the North Arabian languages branch along with Old Arabic that were used in north and central Ara ...

𐪗‎‎‎, South Arabian , and

Geʽez Geez ( or ; , and sometimes referred to in scholarly literature as Classical Ethiopic) is an ancient South Semitic language. The language originates from what is now Ethiopia and Eritrea. Today, Geez is used as the main liturgical langu ...

. The Phoenician letter also gave rise to the

Greek Greek may refer to: Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor of all kno ...

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 ...

(), originally an aspirated voiceless dental stop but now used for the

voiceless dental fricative The voiceless dental non-sibilant fricative is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. It is familiar to most English speakers as the 'th' in ''think''. Though rather rare as a phoneme among the world's languages, it is encount ...

. The Arabic letter (ط) is sometimes transliterated as ''Tah'' in English, for example in

Arabic script in Unicode Many scripts in Unicode, such as Arabic, have special orthographic rules that require certain combinations of letterforms to be combined into special ligature (writing), ligature forms. In English, the common ampersand (&) developed from a ligature ...

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

emphatic consonant In Semitic linguistics, an emphatic consonant is an obstruent consonant which originally contrasted, and often still contrasts, with an analogous voiced or voiceless obstruent by means of a secondary articulation. In specific Semitic languages, ...

Origins

The Phoenician letter name may mean " spinning wheel" pictured as Phoenician_teth

(compare Hebrew root (''ṭ-w-y'') meaning 'spinning' (a thread) which begins with Teth). According to another hypothesis (Brian Colless), the letter possibly continues a

Middle Bronze Age The Bronze Age () was a historical period characterised principally by the use of bronze tools and the development of complex urban societies, as well as the adoption of writing in some areas. The Bronze Age is the middle principal period of ...

glyph named 'good', Aramaic 'tav', Hebrew 'tov', Syriac ܛܒܐ 'tava', modern Arabic ṭayyib''', all of identical meaning. Jewish religious 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 Israel ben Eliezer (According to a forged document from the "Kherson Geniza", accepted only by Chabad, he was born in October 1698. Some Hasidic traditions place his birth as early as 1690, while Simon Dubnow and other modern scholars argue f ...

became influential, since the letter Teth was in his Acronym standing for Tov, and goodness was part of his philosophy. The

acrostic An acrostic is a poem or other word composition in which the ''first'' letter (or syllable, or word) of each new line (or paragraph, or other recurring feature in the text) spells out a word, message or the alphabet. The term comes from the Fre ...

poems of the Bible use 'Tov' to represent the letter (e.g. Psalm 119:65-72).

Arabic ṭāʾ

The letter is named ' ;

Modern Standard Arabic Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) or Modern Written Arabic (MWA) is the variety of Standard language, standardized, Literary language, literary Arabic that developed in the Arab world in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and in some usages al ...

pronunciation: . It has four forms, and the letter does not change its shape depending on its position in the word:

Hebrew tet

The Hebrew spelling of name of the letter:

Hebrew pronunciation

Modern Hebrew Modern Hebrew (, or ), also known as Israeli Hebrew or simply Hebrew, is the Standard language, standard form of the Hebrew language spoken today. It is the only surviving Canaanite language, as well as one of the List of languages by first w ...

, Tet represents a

voiceless alveolar plosive The voiceless alveolar, dental and postalveolar plosives (or stops) are types of consonantal sounds used in almost all spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents voiceless dental, alveolar, and postal ...

, and is therefore usually homophonic with the

abjad An abjad ( or abgad) is a writing system in which only consonants are represented, leaving the vowel sounds to be inferred by the reader. This contrasts with alphabets, which provide graphemes for both consonants and vowels. The term was introd ...

's final letter, Tav . However, Tet can be

pharyngealized Pharyngealization is a secondary articulation of consonants or vowels by which the pharynx or epiglottis is constricted during the articulation of the sound. IPA symbols In the International Phonetic Alphabet, pharyngealization can be indicate ...

to produce in traditional Temani and Sephardi pronunciation. ˤis also probably the pronunciation in Biblical Hebrew.

Significance

gematria In numerology, gematria (; or , plural or ) is the practice of assigning a numerical value to a name, word, or phrase by reading it as a number, or sometimes by using an alphanumeric cipher. The letters of the alphabets involved have standar ...

, 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 A number is a mathematical object used to count, measure, and label. The most basic examples are the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and so forth. Numbers can be represented in language with number words. More universally, individual numbers can ...

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 Zayin (also spelled zain or zayn or simply zay) is the seventh letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician ''zayn'' 𐤆, Hebrew ''zayīn'' , Aramaic ''zain'' 𐡆, Syriac ''zayn'' ܙ, and Arabic ''zāy'' . It represents the sound . It ...

(9+7) instead of Yud and Vav (10+6) to avoid spelling part of the

Tetragrammaton The TetragrammatonPronounced ; ; also known as the Tetragram. is the four-letter Hebrew-language theonym (transliteration, transliterated as YHWH or YHVH), the name of God in the Hebrew Bible. The four Hebrew letters, written and read from ...

. Tet is also one of the seven letters which receive special crowns (called '' tagin'') when written in a

Sefer Torah file:SeferTorah.jpg, A Sephardic Torah scroll rolled to the first paragraph of the Shema file:Köln-Tora-und-Innenansicht-Synagoge-Glockengasse-040.JPG, An Ashkenazi Torah scroll rolled to the Decalogue file:Keneseth Eliyahoo Synagogue, Inte ...

. See Shin,

Ayin ''Ayin'' (also ''ayn'' or ''ain''; transliterated ) is the sixteenth letter of the Semitic scripts, including Phoenician ''ʿayin'' 𐤏, Hebrew ''ʿayin'' , Aramaic ''ʿē'' 𐡏, Syriac ''ʿē'' ܥ, and Arabic ''ʿayn'' (where it is si ...

, Gimmel,

Nun A nun is a woman who vows to dedicate her life to religious service and contemplation, typically living under vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience in the enclosure of a monastery or convent.''The Oxford English Dictionary'', vol. X, page 5 ...

, and Tzadi.

Syriac tet

Similar symbols

A symbol similar to the Phoenician teth is used for the

tensor product In mathematics, the tensor product V \otimes W of two vector spaces V and W (over the same field) is a vector space to which is associated a bilinear map V\times W \rightarrow V\otimes W that maps a pair (v,w),\ v\in V, w\in W to an element of ...

, as

\otimes

, but this is presumably an independent development, by modification of the

multiplication sign The multiplication sign (), also known as the times sign or the dimension sign, is a mathematical symbol used to denote the operation of multiplication, which results in a product. The symbol is also used in botany, in botanical hybrid nam ...

×. The Hebrew is also visually similar to the letter Ʋ.

Character encodings

Notes

References

External links

{{Northwest Semitic abjad Phoenician alphabet Arabic letters Hebrew letters Urdu letters