Tsade

Tsade (also spelled Unicode|Ṣādē or Tzadi or Sadhe or Tzaddik) is the eighteenth letter in many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew Tsadi Ivrit|צ and Arabic ArabDIN|Ṣād _ar. ﺹ. Its oldest sound value is probably IPA2|sˤ, although there is a variety of pronunciation in different modern Semitic languages and their dialects. It represents the coalescence of three Proto-Semitic "emphatic consonants" in Canaanite. Arabic, which kept the phonemes separate, introduced variants of ArabDIN|ṣād and ArabDIN|ṭāʼ to express the three (see ArabDIN|ḍād, ArabDIN|ẓāʼ). In Aramaic, these emphatic consonants coalesced instead with "Unicode|ʻayin" and "Unicode|ṭēt", respectively, thus Hebrew "Unicode|ereẓ" ארץ (earth) is "Unicode|arʻāʼ" ארע in Aramaic.

The Phoenician letter is continued in the Greek Sampi Unicode|Ϡ , and San Unicode|Ϻ and in Etruscan Unicode|