Teth
Teth, also written as or Tet, is the ninth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician ṭēt ?, Hebrew ṭēt, Aramaic
ṭēṯ ?, and Syriac ṭēṯ ܛ, and Arabic ṭāʾ. It is also related to the Ancient North Arabian ?, South Arabian ?, and Geʽez ጠ.
The Phoenician letter also gave rise to the Greek theta, originally an aspirated voiceless dental stop but now used for the voiceless dental fricative. The Arabic letter is sometimes transliterated as Tah in English, for example in Arabic script in Unicode.
The sound value of Teth is, one of the Semitic emphatic consonants.
Origins
The Phoenician letter name may mean "spinning wheel" pictured as meaning 'spinning'. According to another hypothesis, the letter possibly continues a Middle Bronze Age glyph named 'good', Aramaic 'tav', Hebrew 'tov', Syriac ܛܒܐ 'tava', modern Arabic طَيّب 'ṭayyibJewish religious books about the "holy letters" from the 10th century onward discuss the connection or origin of the letter Teth with the word tov "good". This is alluded to in a cryptic aggadata in the Talmud Baba Kamma 54b. Additionally the first time the letter "tes" appears in the Torah is in the word "Tov" meaning "good."
This was especially emphasized ever since the late 1600s after the Baal Shem Tov became influential, since the letter Teth was in his Acronym standing for Tov, and goodness was part of his philosophy.
The acrostic poems of the Bible use 'Tov' to represent the letter.
Arabic ṭāʾ
The letter is named طَاءْ; Modern Standard Arabic pronunciation:.It has four forms, and the letter does not change its shape depending on its position in the word:
Hebrew tet
The Hebrew spelling of name of the letter:Hebrew pronunciation
In Modern Hebrew, Tet represents a voiceless alveolar plosive, and is therefore usually homophonic with the abjad's final letter, Tav. However, Tet can be pharyngealized to produce in traditional Temani and Sephardi pronunciation. is also probably the pronunciation in Biblical Hebrew.Significance
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.As well, in gematria, the number 15 is written with Tet and Vav, to avoid the normal construction Yud and Hei which spells a name of God. Similarly, 16 is written with Tet and Zayin instead of Yud and Vav to avoid spelling part of the Tetragrammaton.
Tet is also one of the seven letters which receive special crowns when written in a Sefer Torah. See Shin, Ayin, Gimmel, Nun, Zayin, and Tzadi.