Taw

Letter of many Semitic alphabets Taw, tav, or taf is the twenty-second and last letter of the Semitic abjads, including Arabic tāʾ ت, Aramaic taw 𐡕‎, Hebrew tav ת, Phoenician tāw 𐤕, and Syriac taw ܬ. In Arabic, it also gives rise to the derived letter ث ṯāʾ. Taw's original sound value has been claimed to be /t/. It is related to the Ancient North Arabian 𐪉‎‎‎, South Arabian 𐩩, and Geʽez ተ.[citation needed] The Phoenician letter potentially gave rise to the Greek tau (Τ), Latin T, and Cyrillic Т. Origins Taw is believed to be derived from the Egyptian hieroglyph representing a tally mark.[citation needed] Arabic tāʾ The letter is named tāʼ. It is written in several ways depending on its position in the word: Final ـَتْ (fatha, then tāʼ with a sukun on it, pronounced /at/, though diacritics are normally omitted) is used to mark feminine gender for third-person perfective/past tense verbs, while final تَ (tāʼ-fatḥa, /ta/) is used to mark past-tense second-person singular masculine verbs, final تِ (tāʼ-kasra, /ti/) to mark past-tense second-person singular feminine verbs, and final تُ (tāʼ-ḍamma, /tu/) to mark past-tense fir