Teth

Teth, also written as Ṭēth or Tet, is the ninth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician ṭēt 𐤈, Hebrew ṭēt ט‎, Aramaic ṭēṯ 𐡈, Syriac ṭēṯ ܛ, and Arabic ṭāʾ ط‎. It is also related to the Ancient North Arabian 𐪗‎‎‎, South Arabian 𐩷, and Geʽez ጠ.

The Phoenician letter also gave rise to the Greek theta (Θ), 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 /tˤ/, one of the Semitic emphatic consonants.

Origins

The Phoenician letter name ṭēth may mean "spinning wheel". Some believe the letter comes from a Middle Bronze Age symbol named ṭab meaning "good". Many Jewish religious books talk about how the letter Teth is connected to the word tov meaning "good". This idea became more popular after the Baal Shem Tov became well-known, because the letter Teth was part of his name, which stood for "Tov" or goodness. Bible poems also use the word 'Tov' to represent the letter.

Arabic ṭāʾ

The letter is named ṭāʾ طَاءْ. In Modern Standard Arabic, it is pronounced /tˤ/.

It has four forms, and the letter’s shape does not change based on its position in a word.

Hebrew tet

In Modern Hebrew, the letter Tet makes the "t" sound, just like the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet, Tav ת‎. But in some older ways of speaking, like in Temani and Sephardi traditions, it can sound a little different.

In a special system called gematria, Tet stands for the number nine. If you see it with an apostrophe after it, it means 9,000. This is often used when talking about Hebrew years.

Tet is one of seven letters that get special decorations called tagin when written in a very important book called a Sefer Torah.

Syriac tet

The Syriac tet is a letter used in the Syriac alphabet. It is part of a group of ancient letters that are related across many languages. This letter connects to others like the Phoenician, Hebrew, and Arabic letters, showing how writing has developed over time.

Similar symbols

Main article: Circled plus

A symbol that looks like the Phoenician teth is used for the tensor product, shown as ⊗, but this likely came from changing the multiplication sign ×. The Hebrew letter ט‎ also looks similar to another letter called Ʋ.

Character encodings

The letter Teth is used in many ancient and modern writing systems. It appears in Phoenician as ṭēt 𐤈, in Hebrew as ṭēt ט‎, in Aramaic as ṭēṯ 𐡈, in Syriac as ṭēṯ ܛ, and in Arabic as ṭāʾ ط‎. It is also found in Ancient North Arabian as 𐪗‎‎‎, South Arabian as 𐩷, and Geʽez as ጠ. Over time, this letter influenced the Greek letter theta (Θ).