() is the fourth letter of the
Arabic alphabet
The Arabic alphabet, or the Arabic abjad, is the Arabic script as specifically codified for writing the Arabic language. It is a unicase, unicameral script written from right-to-left in a cursive style, and includes 28 letters, of which most ...
, one of the six letters not in the twenty-two akin to the
Phoenician alphabet
The Phoenician alphabet is an abjad (consonantal alphabet) used across the Mediterranean civilization of Phoenicia for most of the 1st millennium BC. It was one of the first alphabets, attested in Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions fo ...
(the others being , , , , ). It is 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 ...
𐪛, and
South Arabian .
In
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 ...
it represents 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 ...
, also found in English as the "
th" in words such as "thank" and "thin".
In
Persian,
Urdu
Urdu (; , , ) is an Indo-Aryan languages, Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in South Asia. It is the Languages of Pakistan, national language and ''lingua franca'' of Pakistan. In India, it is an Eighth Schedule to the Constitution of Indi ...
, and
Kurdish it is pronounced as s as in "sister" in English. ''Ṯāʾ'', along those with the letter ''
shīn'', are the only two surviving Arabic letters with three dots above. In most European languages, it is mostly romanized as the digraph ''th''. In other languages, such as
Indonesian, this Arabic letter is often romanized as ''ts'' and ''Ṡ''.
The most common transliteration in English is "th", e.g. Ethiopia (), thawb ().
In name and shape, it is a variant of ().
Its numerical value is 500 (see
Abjad numerals
The Abjad numerals, also called Hisab al-Jummal (, ), are a decimal alphabetic numeral system/alphanumeric code, in which the 28 letters of the Arabic alphabet are assigned numerical values. They have been used in the Arab world, Arabic-speaking ...
).
The Arabic letter is named ''ṯāʾ''. It is written in several ways depending in its position in the word:
In contemporary spoken Arabic, pronunciation of ṯāʾ as is found in the Arabian Peninsula, Iraqi, and Tunisian and other dialects and in highly educated pronunciations of Modern Standard and Classical Arabic. Pronunciation of the letter varies between and within the various
varieties of Arabic
Varieties of Arabic (or dialects or vernaculars) are the linguistic systems that Arabic speakers speak natively. Arabic is a Semitic languages, Semitic language within the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic family that originated in the Arabian P ...
: while it is consistently pronounced as the
voiceless dental plosive
The voiceless alveolar, dental and postalveolar plosives (or stops) are types of consonantal sounds used in almost all Speech communication, spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents voiceless dental con ...
in
Maghrebi Arabic
Maghrebi Arabic, often known as ''ad-Dārija'' to differentiate it from Literary Arabic, is a vernacular Arabic dialect continuum spoken in the Maghreb. It includes the Moroccan, Algerian, Tunisian, Libyan, Hassaniya and Saharan Arabic di ...
(except Tunisian and eastern Libyan), on the other hand in the Arabic varieties of the
Mashriq
The Mashriq (; ), also known as the Arab Mashriq (), sometimes spelled Mashreq or Mashrek, is a term used by Arabs to refer to the eastern part of the Arab world, as opposed to the Maghreb (western) region, and located in West Asia and easter ...
(in the broad sense, including Egyptian, Sudanese and Levantine) and
Hejazi Arabic
Hejazi Arabic or Hijazi Arabic (HA) (, Hejazi Arabic: , ), also known as West Arabian Arabic, is a Varieties of Arabic, variety of Arabic spoken in the Hejaz region in Saudi Arabia. Strictly speaking, there are two main groups of dialects spoken i ...
, it is pronounced as the
sibilant
Sibilants (from 'hissing') are fricative and affricate consonants of higher amplitude and pitch, made by directing a stream of air with the tongue towards the teeth. Examples of sibilants are the consonants at the beginning of the English w ...
voiceless alveolar fricative
The voiceless alveolar fricatives are a type of fricative consonant pronounced with the tip or blade of the tongue against the alveolar ridge (gum line) just behind the teeth. This refers to a class of sounds, not a single sound. There are at lea ...
in loanwords from Literary Arabic.
When representing this sound in transliteration of Arabic into Hebrew, it is written as ת׳.
Common Semitic perspective
The choice of the letter ' as the base for this letter was not due to etymology (see
History of the Arabic alphabet
The Arabic alphabet is thought to be traced back to a Nabataean variation of the Aramaic alphabet, known as Nabataean Aramaic. This script itself descends from the Phoenician alphabet, an ancestral alphabet that additionally gave rise to the H ...
), but rather due to phonetic similarity. For other Semitic cognates of the phoneme ' see
Sound changes between Proto-Semitic and the daughter languages.
Ethiopia
Ethiopia, officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a landlocked country located in the Horn of Africa region of East Africa. It shares borders with Eritrea to the north, Djibouti to the northeast, Somalia to the east, Ken ...
is the only country name in Arabic that uses the letter ṯāʾ on their name.
Character encodings
See also
*
Arabic phonology
While many languages have numerous dialects that differ in phonology, contemporary spoken Arabic is more properly described as a varieties of Arabic, continuum of varieties. This article deals primarily with Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), which ...
References
Arabic letters
Urdu letters
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