- Teth
transl|sem|Ṭēth (also Teth, Tet) is the ninth letter of many
Semitic abjads , including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew Tet Ivrit|ט, Syriac unicode|ܛ and Arabic ArabDIN|Ṭāʾ unicode|ط; it is 9th in abjadi order and 16th in modern Arabic order.Its sound value is IPA2|tˤ, one of the Semitic
emphatic consonant s.The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek
Theta (Θ).Origins
The Phoenician letter name transl|sem|ṭēth means "wheel", but the letter possibly (according to
Brian Colless ) continues a Middle Bronze Age glyph named transl|sem|ṭab "good", "tayeb" طيب in modern Arabic, based on the "nfr" "good" hieroglyph,F35 Hebrew Tet
Hebrew Pronunciation:
In Modern Hebrew, Tet represents a
voiceless alveolar plosive IPA|/t/, although this can be pharyngealized to produce IPA| [tˤ] in traditional Temani andSephardi pronunciation.ignificance
In
gematria , Tet 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 (i.e. ט'תשנד in numbers would be the date 9754).As well, in gematria, the number 15 is written with Tet and Vav, (9+6) to avoid the normal construction Yud and Hei (10+5) which spells a name of God. Similarly, 16 is written with Tet and
Zayin (9+7) instead of Yud and Vav (10+6) to avoid spelling part of theTetragrammaton .Tet is also one of the seven letters which receive a special crown (called a "tagin") when written in a
Sefer Torah . See Shin,Ayin ,Gimmel , Nun,Zayin , and Tzadi.Arabic Ṭāʼ
The letter is named "ṭāʼ"; standard pronunciation: IPA| [tˤ] . It is written in several ways depending in its position in the word:
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.
