Teth, also written as Tet or , is the ninth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician ṭēt 𐤈, Hebrew ṭēṯ , Aramaic ṭēṯ 𐡈, Syriac ṭēṯ ܛ, and Arabic ṭāʾ . It is also related to the Ancient North Arabian 𐪗, South Arabian , and Geʽez .
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.
Teth represents the phoneme , one of the Semitic emphatic consonants.
Origins The Phoenician letter name may mean "spinning wheel" pictured as (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 glyph named 'good', Aramaic 'ṭav', Hebrew 'ṭov', Syriac ܛܒܐ 'ṭava', 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 ṭov "good". This is alluded to in a cryptic aggadata in the Talmud Baba Kamma 54b. Additionally the first time the letter "tes" appears in the Torah is in the word "ṭov" meaning "good." This was especially emphasized ever since the late 1600s after the Baal Shem Tov became influential, since the letter ṭēṯ was in his Acronym standing for ṭov, and goodness was part of his philosophy. The acrostic poems of the Bible use '''ṭov' to represent the letter (e.g. Psalm 119:65-72).
Arabic ṭāʾ The letter is named ; Modern Standard Arabic pronunciation: .
It has four forms, and the letter does not change its shape depending on its position in the word:
Hebrew teth The Hebrew letter teth' () represents an emphatic voiced alveolar plosive , which has merged in pronunciation with in Modern Israeli, Ashkenazi, and Sephardic Hebrew to be pronounced . Historically and in other less-prominent pronunciations, it is pharyngealised , and in Pre-Exilic Hebrew, it was ejective . Orthographic variantsSerif sans-Serif MonospacedCursiveHebrewSolitreoRashiscriptטטטIn gematria, Teth 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 Teth and Vav, (9+6) to avoid the normal construction Yod and He (10+5) which spells a name of God. Similarly, 16 is written with Teth and Zayin (9+7) instead of Yod and Vav (10+6) to avoid spelling part of the Tetragrammaton.
Teth is also one of the seven letters which receive special crowns (called tagin'') when written in a Torah Scroll. See Shin, Ayin, Gimel, Nun, Zayin, and Sade.
Syriac teth
Similar symbols
A symbol similar to the Phoenician teth is used for the tensor product, as , 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
See also Ṭ
Notes
References
External links