Taw (letter)

Taw, tav, or taf is the twenty-second and last letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician Tāw , Hebrew Tav , Aramaic Taw , Syriac Taw ܬ, and Arabic ت Tāʼ (22nd in abjadi order, 3rd in modern order). In Arabic, it is also gives rise to the derived letter Ṯāʼ. Its original sound value is .

The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek '' tau'' (Τ), Latin T, and Cyrillic Т.

Origins of taw

Taw is believed to be derived from the Egyptian hieroglyph representing a tally mark (viz. a decussate cross) Z9

Arabic tāʼ

The letter is named '. It is written in several ways depending on its position in the word:

Final ('' fatha'', then with a sukun on it, pronounced , though diacritics are normally omitted) is used to mark feminine gender for third-person perfective/past tense verbs, while final (, ) is used to mark past-tense second-person singular masculine verbs, final (, ) to mark past-tense second-person singular feminine verbs, and final (, ) to mark past-tense first-person singular verbs. The plural form of Arabic letter is ' (), a palindrome.

Recently, the isolated has been used online as an emoticon, because it resembles a smiling face.

Tāʼ marbūṭa

An alternative form called (ـَة, ة) (), "bound '") is used at the end of words to mark feminine gender for nouns and adjectives. Regular ', to distinguish it from , is referred to as ' (, "open ").

In words such as ('letter, message', 'epistle'), the () + combination () is transliterated as ' or ' (' or '), and pronounced as (as if there were only a ). Historically, was pronounced as the sound in all positions, but now the sound is dropped in coda positions.

However, when a word ending with a ' is suffixed with a grammatical case ending or any other suffix, the is clearly pronounced. For example, the word ('letter, message', 'epistle') is pronounced as in pausa but is pronounced in the nominative case ( being the nominative case ending), in the genitive case ( being the genitive case ending), and in the accusative case ( being the accusative case ending). When the possessive suffix ('my') is added, it becomes ('my letter') . The /t/ is also always pronounced when the word is in construct state (), for example in ('The Epistle of Forgiveness').

Note that the isolated and final forms of this letter combine the shape of () and the two dots of (). When words containing the symbol are borrowed into other languages written in the Arabic alphabet (such as Persian), ' usually becomes either a regular or a regular .

Hebrew Tav

Hebrew spelling:

Hebrew pronunciation

The letter ''tav'' in Modern Hebrew usually represents a voiceless alveolar plosive: .

Variations on written form and pronunciation

The letter ''tav'' is one of the six letters that can receive a dagesh kal diacritic; the others are bet, gimel, dalet, kaph and pe. Bet, kaph and pe have their sound values changed in modern Hebrew from the fricative to the plosive, by adding a dagesh. In modern Hebrew, the other three do not change their pronunciation with or without a dagesh, but they have had alternate pronunciations at other times and places.

In traditional Ashkenazi pronunciation, tav represents an without the dagesh and has the plosive form when it has the dagesh. Among Yemen and some Sephardi areas, tav without a dagesh represented a voiceless dental fricative —a pronunciation hailed by the Sfath Emeth work as wholly authentic, while the tav with the dagesh is the plosive . In traditional Italian pronunciation, tav without a dagesh is sometimes .

Tav with a geresh () is sometimes used in order to represent the TH digraph in loanwords.

Significance of tav

In gematria, tav represents the number 400, the largest single number that can be represented without using the ' (final) forms (see kaph, mem, nun, pe, and tzade).

In representing names from foreign languages, a ''geresh'' or ''chupchik'' can also be placed after the tav (), making it represent . (See also: Hebraization of English)

In Judaism

Tav is the last letter of the Hebrew word ''emet'', which means 'truth'. The midrash explains that ''emet'' is made up of the first, middle, and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet (aleph, mem, and tav: ). ''Sheqer'' (שקר, falsehood), on the other hand, is made up of the 19th, 20th, and 21st (and penultimate) letters.

Thus, truth is all-encompassing, while falsehood is narrow and deceiving. In Jewish mythology it was the word ''emet'' that was carved into the head of the golem which ultimately gave it life. But when the letter ''aleph'' was erased from the golem's forehead, what was left was "''met''"—dead. And so the golem died.

Ezekiel 9:4 depicts a vision in which the ''tav'' plays a Passover role similar to the blood on the lintel and doorposts of a Hebrew home in Egypt. In Ezekiel's vision, the Lord has his angels separate the demographic wheat from the chaff by going through Jerusalem, the capital city of ancient Israel, and inscribing a mark, a tav, "upon the foreheads of the men that sigh and that cry for all the abominations that be done in the midst thereof."

In Ezekiel's vision, then, the Lord is counting tav-marked Israelites as worthwhile to spare, but counts the people worthy of annihilation who lack the tav and the critical attitude it signifies. In other words, looking askance at a culture marked by dire moral decline is a kind of shibboleth for loyalty and zeal for God.Cf. the New Testament's condemnation of lukewarmness in ''Revelation'' 3:15-16

Sayings with taf

"From aleph to taf" describes something from beginning to end, the Hebrew equivalent of the English "From A to Z."

Syriac taw

In the Syriac alphabet, as in the Hebrew and Phoenician alphabets, ''taw'' () or ''tăw'' ( ''or'' ) is the final letter in the alphabet, most commonly representing the voiceless dental stop and fricative consonant pair, differentiated phonemically by hard and soft markings. When left as unmarked or marked with a ''qūššāyā'' dot above the letter indicating 'hard' pronunciation, it is realized as a plosive . When the phoneme is marked with a ''rūkkāḵā'' dot below the letter indicating 'soft' pronunciation, the phone is spirantized to a fricative . Hard taw (''taw qšīṯā'') is Romanized as a plain ''t'', while the soft form of the letter (''taw rakkīḵtā'') is transliterated as ' or '.

Character encodings

See also

*Tav (number)

Footnotes

External links

{{Northwest Semitic abjad

Phoenician alphabet
Arabic letters
Hebrew letters
Cross symbols