Taw, tav, or taf is the twenty-second and last letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician tāw, Hebrew tav, Aramaic taw , Syriac taw ܬ, and Arabic tāʾ (22nd in abjadi order, 3rd in modern order). In Arabic, it also gives rise to the derived letter Arabic: ث ṯāʾ. Its original sound value is pronounced as /link/.
The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek tau (Τ), Latin T, and Cyrillic Т.
Taw is believed to be derived from the Egyptian hieroglyph representing a tally mark.
The letter is named . It is written in several ways depending on its position in the word:
Final Arabic: ـَتْ (fatha, then with a sukun on it, pronounced pronounced as //at//, though diacritics are normally omitted) is used to mark feminine gender for third-person perfective/past tense verbs, while final Arabic: تَ (pronounced as //ta//) is used to mark past-tense second-person singular masculine verbs, final Arabic: تِ (pronounced as //ti//) to mark past-tense second-person singular feminine verbs, and final Arabic: تُ (pronounced as //tu//) to mark past-tense first-person singular verbs. The plural form of Arabic letter Arabic: ت is (Arabic: تاءات), a palindrome.
Recently, the isolated Arabic: ت has been used online as an emoticon in the Western world, because it resembles a smiling face.[1]
An alternative form called (ـَة, ة), "bound ") is used at the end of words to mark feminine gender for nouns and adjectives. Regular , to distinguish it from, is referred to as ("open ").
In words such as Arabic: رِسَالَة ('letter, message, epistle'), the (pronounced as //a//) + combination (Arabic: ـَة) is transliterated as or ( or ), and pronounced as pronounced as //-a// (as if there were only a). Historically, was pronounced as the pronounced as /link/ sound in all positions, but now the pronounced as /link/ sound is dropped in coda positions.
However, when a word ending with a is suffixed with a grammatical case ending or any other suffix, the pronounced as //t// is clearly pronounced. For example, the word Arabic: رِسَالَة ('letter, message', 'epistle') is pronounced as in pausa but is pronounced in the nominative case (pronounced as //un// being the nominative case ending), in the genitive case (pronounced as //in// being the genitive case ending), and in the accusative case (pronounced as //an// being the accusative case ending). When the possessive suffix ('my') is added, it becomes ('my letter') . The /t/ is also always pronounced when the word is in construct state, for example in ('The Epistle of Forgiveness').
The isolated and final forms of this letter combine the shape of (Arabic: [[ه]]) and the two dots of (Arabic: ت). When words containing the symbol are borrowed into other languages written in the Arabic script, such as Persian, usually becomes either a regular Arabic: ه or a regular Arabic: ت.
Hebrew spelling:
The letter tav in Modern Hebrew usually represents a voiceless alveolar plosive: pronounced as //t//.
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 pronounced as //s// 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 pronounced as //θ//—a pronunciation hailed by the Sfath Emeth work as wholly authentic, while the tav with the dagesh is the plosive pronounced as //t//. In traditional Italian pronunciation, tav without a dagesh is sometimes pronounced as //d//.
Tav with a geresh is sometimes used in order to represent the TH digraph in loanwords.
In gematria, tav represents the number 400, the largest single number that can be represented without using the (final) forms (see kaph, mem, nun, pe, and tzade).
In representing names from foreign languages, a geresh or chupchik can also be placed after the tav (Hebrew: ת׳), making it represent pronounced as /link/. (See also: Hebraization of English)
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: Hebrew: אמת). Sheqer (Hebrew: rtl=yes|שקר, 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.[2] 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.[3]
"From aleph to taf" describes something from beginning to end, the Hebrew equivalent of the English "From A to Z."
In the Syriac alphabet, as in the Hebrew and Phoenician alphabets, taw (Classical Syriac: {{Script/Strng|ܬܰܐܘ) or tăw (Classical Syriac: {{Script/Mdnh|ܬܲܘ or Classical Syriac: {{Script/Serto|ܬܰܘ) is the final letter in the alphabet, most commonly representing the voiceless dental stop pronounced as /link/ and fricative pronounced as /link/ consonant pair, differentiated phonemically by hard and soft markings. When left as unmarked
Classical Syriac: {{Script/Strng|ܬ Classical Syriac: {{Script/Mdnh|ܬ Classical Syriac: {{Script/Serto|ܬ or marked with a qūššāyā dot above the letter Classical Syriac: {{Script/Strng|ܬ݁ Classical Syriac: {{Script/Mdnh|ܬ݁ Classical Syriac: {{Script/Serto|ܬ݁ indicating 'hard' pronunciation, it is realized as a plosive pronounced as //t//. When the phoneme is marked with a rūkkāḵā dot below the letter Classical Syriac: {{Script/Strng|ܬ݂ Classical Syriac: {{Script/Mdnh|ܬ݂ Classical Syriac: {{Script/Serto|ܬ݂ indicating 'soft' pronunciation, the phone is spirantized to a fricative pronounced as //θ//. Hard taw (taw qšīṯā) is Romanized as a plain t, while the soft form of the letter (taw rakkīḵtā) is transliterated as or .