Taw

Origins

Taw is believed to be derived from the Egyptian hieroglyph representing a tally mark.

Arabic tāʾ

Final ـَتْ (fatha, then ar 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 تَ (ar, ) is used to mark past-tense second-person singular masculine verbs, final تِ (ar, ) to mark past-tense second-person singular feminine verbs, and final تُ (ar, ) to mark past-tense first-person singular verbs. The plural form of Arabic letter ت is ar (تاءات), a palindrome.

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

Tā' marbūṭa

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

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

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

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

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 he (final) forms (see kaph, mem, nun, pe, and tzade).

In representing names from foreign languages, a geresh can also be placed after the tav (ת׳), 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: אמת). Sheqer (, 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.

Sayings with taf

״מאל״ף עד תי״ו״, "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 ({{Script/Strng|ܬܰܐܘ}}) or tăw ({{Script/Mdnh|ܬܲܘ}} or {{Script/Serto|ܬܰܘ}}) 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 {{Script/Strng|ܬ}} {{Script/Mdnh|ܬ}} {{Script/Serto|ܬ}} or marked with a qūššāyā dot above the letter {{Script/Strng|ܬ݁}} {{Script/Mdnh|ܬ݁}} {{Script/Serto|ܬ݁}} indicating 'hard' pronunciation, it is realized as a plosive . When the phoneme is marked with a rūkkāḵā dot below the letter {{Script/Strng|ܬ݂}} {{Script/Mdnh|ܬ݂}} {{Script/Serto|ܬ݂}} 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 syc or syc.

Character encodings

|05EA|name1=Hebrew Letter Tav |062A|name2=Arabic Letter Teh |072C|name3=Syriac Letter Taw

|0815|name1=Samaritan Letter Tof |1039A|name2=Ugaritic Letter To |10855|name3=Imperial Aramaic Letter Taw |10915|name4=Phoenician Letter Tau

Footnotes

References

1. "Smileys Symbols ㋡ ㋛ ☺ ☹ ☻ 〠 シ ッ ツ ヅ".
2. ''Exodus'' 12:7,12.
3. Cf. the New Testament's condemnation of lukewarmness in ''Revelation'' 3:15-16