|Phonemic representation||t (also θ, s)|
|Position in alphabet||22|
|Alphabetic derivatives of the Phoenician|
Taw, tav, or taf is the twenty-second and last letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician Tāw , Hebrew Tav ת, Aramaic Taw , Syriac Taw ܬ, and Arabic Tāʼ ت (in abjadi order, 3rd in modern order). Its original sound value is /t/.
Origins of taw
Taw is believed to be derived from the Egyptian hieroglyph meaning "mark"
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The letter is named tāʼ . It is written in several ways depending on its position in the word:
|Position in word:||Isolated||Final||Medial||Initial|
Final ـَتْ (fathah, then tāʼ with a sukun on it, pronounced /at/, though diacritics are normally omitted) is used to mark feminine gender for third-person perfective/past tense verbs, while final تَ (tāʼ-fatḥah, /ta/) is used to mark past-tense second-person singular masculine verbs, final تِ (tāʼ-kasrah, /ti/) to mark past-tense second-person singular feminine verbs, and final تُ (tāʼ-ḍammah, /tu/) to mark past-tense first-person singular verbs. The plural form of Arabic letter ت is tāʼāt (تاءات), a palindrome.
An alternative form called tāʼ marbūṭah (تاء مربوطة, "bound tāʼ ") is used at the end of words to mark feminine gender for nouns and adjectives. It denotes the final sound /-a/ and, when in construct state, /-at/. Regular tāʼ, to distinguish it from tāʼ marbūṭah, is referred to as tāʼ maftūḥah (تاء مفتوحة, "open tāʼ ").
|Position in word:||Isolated||Final||Medial||Initial|
In words such as risālah رسالة ('letter, message'), tāʼ marbūṭah is denoted as h, and pronounced as /-a/. Historically, it was pronounced as the /t/ sound in all positions, but in coda positions it eventually developed into a weakly aspirated /h/ sound (which is why tāʼ marbūṭah looks like a hāʼ (ه)); this /h/ itself was eventually left pronounced. When a word ending with a tāʼ marbūṭah is suffixed with a grammatical case ending or (in Modern Standard Arabic or the dialects) any other suffix, the /t/ is clearly pronounced. For example, the word رسالة ('letter, message') is pronounced as risāla(h) in pausa but is pronounced risālatu in the nominative case (/u/ being the nominative case ending). The pronunciation is /t/, just like a regular tāʼ (ت), but the identity of the "character" remains a tāʼ marbūṭah. Note that the isolated and final forms of this letter combine the shape of hāʼ and the two dots of tāʼ .
|Various print fonts||Cursive
Hebrew spelling: תָו
The letter tav in modern Hebrew usually represents a voiceless alveolar plosive: /t/.
Variations on written form and pronunciation
The letter tav is one of the six letters which can receive a dagesh kal diacritic, besides bet, gimel, dalet, kaph and pe. Three of them – 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 – including tav – do not change their pronunciation with or without a dagesh, but have had alternate pronunciations at other times and places.
In traditional Ashkenazi pronunciation, tav represents an /s/ without the dagesh, and has the plosive form when it has the dagesh. In some Sephardi areas, some Chassidic groups, as well as Yemen, tav without a dagesh represented a voiceless dental fricative /θ/, and tav with the dagesh is the plosive /t/. In traditional Italian pronunciation, tav without a dagesh is sometimes /s/ (for example in the word tallit that is pronounced talled).
Significance of tav
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
"From aleph to taf" describes something from beginning to end, the Hebrew equivalent of the English "From A to Z."
|Unicode name||HEBREW LETTER TAV||ARABIC LETTER TAH||SYRIAC LETTER TAW|
|UTF-8||215 170||D7 AA||216 170||D8 AA||220 172||DC AC|
|Numeric character reference||ת||ת||ت||ت||ܬ||ܬ|
|Unicode name||SAMARITAN LETTER TOF||UGARITIC LETTER TO||IMPERIAL ARAMAIC LETTER TAW||PHOENICIAN LETTER TAU|
|UTF-8||224 160 149||E0 A0 95||240 144 142 153||F0 90 8E 99||240 144 161 149||F0 90 A1 95||240 144 164 149||F0 90 A4 95|
|UTF-16||2069||0815||55296 57241||D800 DF99||55298 56405||D802 DC55||55298 56597||D802 DD15|
|Numeric character reference||ࠕ||ࠕ||𐎙||𐎙||𐡕||𐡕||𐤕||𐤕|
||This article includes a list of references, but its sources remain unclear because it has insufficient inline citations. (March 2009) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)|
- Exodus 12:7,12.
- Cf. the New Testament's condemnation of lukewarmness in Revelation 3:15-16
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