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Taw, tav, or taf is the twenty-second and last letter of the Semitic abjads, including Arabic script tāʾ , Aramaic alphabet taw 𐡕, Hebrew alphabet tav , Phoenician tāw 𐤕, and Syriac alphabet taw ܬ. In Arabic, it also gives rise to the derived letter ث ṯāʾ. Its original sound value is . It is related to the Ancient North Arabian 𐪉, South Arabian 𐩩, and Ge'ez ተ.
The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek alphabet tau (Τ), Latin alphabet T, and Cyrillic script Т.
Final ـَتْ ( Fathah, then with a sukun on it, Arabic phonology , though diacritics are normally omitted) is used to mark feminine gender for third-person perfective/past tense verbs, while final تَ (, ) is used to mark past-tense second-person singular masculine verbs, final تِ (, ) to mark past-tense second-person singular feminine verbs, and final تُ (, ) to mark past-tense first-person singular verbs. The plural form of Arabic letter ت is (تاءات), a palindrome.
Recently, the isolated ت has been used online as an emoticon in the Western world, because it resembles a smiling face.
In words such as رِسَالَة ('letter, message, epistle'), the () + combination (ـَة) is transliteration as or ( or ), and pronounced as (as if there were only a ). Historically, was pronounced as the sound in all positions, but now the 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 is clearly pronounced. For example, the word رِسَالَة ('letter, message', 'epistle') is pronounced as in pausa but is pronounced in the nominative case ( being the nominative case ending), in the genitive case ( being the genitive case ending), and in the accusative case ( 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 (ه) and the two dots of (ت). When words containing the symbol are borrowed into other languages written in the Arabic script, such as Persian language, usually becomes either a regular ه or a regular ت.
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Hebrew spelling:
In traditional Ashkenazi pronunciation, tav represents an without the dagesh and has the plosive form when it has the dagesh. Among Yemenite Jews and some Sephardi areas, tav without a dagesh represented a voiceless dental fricative —a pronunciation hailed by the Bension Kohen work as wholly authentic, while the tav with the dagesh is the plosive . In traditional Italian Jews pronunciation, tav without a dagesh is sometimes .
Tav with a geresh () is sometimes used in order to represent the TH digraph in loanwords.
In representing names from foreign languages, a geresh can also be placed after the tav (ת׳), making it represent . (See also: Hebraization of English)
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. Exodus 12:7,12. 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.Cf. the New Testament's condemnation of lukewarmness in Revelation 3:15-16
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