Te (Т т; italics: ''Т т'') is a letter of the

Cyrillic script The Cyrillic script ( ), Slavonic script or the Slavic script, is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking c ...

. It commonly represents the

voiceless alveolar plosive The voiceless alveolar, dental and postalveolar plosives (or stops) are types of consonantal sounds used in almost all spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents voiceless dental, alveolar, and posta ...

, like the pronunciation of in "stop". Ligature ТЬ became ligature Cyrillic small letter Te Soft-sign

History

The Cyrillic letter Te was derived from the Greek letter Tau (Τ τ). The name of Te in the

Early Cyrillic alphabet The Early Cyrillic alphabet, also called classical Cyrillic or paleo-Cyrillic, is a writing system that was developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the late 9th century on the basis of the Greek alphabet for the Slavic people living ...

was (''tvrdo''), meaning "hard" or "surly". In the

Cyrillic numeral system Cyrillic numerals are a numeral system derived from the Cyrillic script, developed in the First Bulgarian Empire in the late 10th century. It was used in the First Bulgarian Empire and by South and East Slavic peoples. The system was used in ...

, Te has a value of 300.

Form

The capital Cyrillic letter Te (Т т) looks the same as the capital Latin letter T (T t) but, as with most Cyrillic letters, the lowercase form is simply a smaller version of the uppercase. In

italic type In typography, italic type is a cursive font based on a stylised form of calligraphic handwriting. Owing to the influence from calligraphy, italics normally slant slightly to the right. Italics are a way to emphasise key points in a printed ...

and

cursive Cursive (also known as script, among other names) is any style of penmanship in which characters are written joined in a flowing manner, generally for the purpose of making writing faster, in contrast to block letters. It varies in functionali ...

, the lowercase form looks like the italic form of the lowercase Latin M , except in Bulgarian,

Serbian Serbian may refer to: * someone or something related to Serbia, a country in Southeastern Europe * someone or something related to the Serbs, a South Slavic people * Serbian language * Serbian names See also * * * Old Serbian (disambiguation ...

and

Macedonian Macedonian most often refers to someone or something from or related to Macedonia. Macedonian(s) may specifically refer to: People Modern * Macedonians (ethnic group), a nation and a South Slavic ethnic group primarily associated with North Ma ...

usage where it looks like an inverted lowercase Latin M, with a stroke above to distinguish it from the otherwise identical italic lowercase letter Sha , which is sometimes written with a stroke below. Compare the 5th letter pair in the 4th row with the last letter pair of the chart. The cursive form of the capital letter Te can also be seen in the chart following the lower case letter. In some old materials, the lowercase form has two variants: on the ''Trebnik'' of Metropolitan Peter and the ''Ostrog Bible'' this letter has a taller variant looks like number 7 (); on some vernacular Russian publications up to the mid-19th century, this letter have been found as a variant resembling a turned Sha (). Both of them were encoded in the Unicode Standard in June 2016 with the release of version 9.0.

Usage

As used in the alphabets of various languages, Te represents the following sounds: *

, like the pronunciation of in "tick" * palatalized voiceless alveolar plosive The pronunciations shown in the table are the primary ones for each language; for details consult the articles on the languages.

Related letters and other similar characters

*Τ τ : Greek letter Tau *T t : Latin letter T *Ҭ ҭ : Cyrillic letter Ҭ *Ԏ ԏ : Cyrillic letter Komi Tje *Ћ ћ : Cyrillic Tshe

Computing codes

References

External links

* *{{Wiktionary-inline, т Cross symbols