ט, the letter tet

History

ט, tet, stands for the number nine, and followed by an apostrophe it means 9,000.^[1] It began as one of the Semitic emphatic consonants, a t said with the throat tightened, and some traditions still pronounce it that way.^[2] In Modern Israeli, Ashkenazi and Sephardic Hebrew it has merged with /t/ and sounds like a plain t.^[3]

Fifteen is written with tet and vav, 9 + 6, instead of yod and he, 10 + 5, because that pair spells a name of God.^[4] Sixteen is tet and zayin, 9 + 7, instead of yod and vav, for the same reason.^[5] So in a Hebrew-lettered number, fifteen and sixteen begin with tet rather than yod.

From the 10th century onward, Jewish books about the holy letters discuss its connection with ṭov, the word for good.^[6]

In a Torah scroll, tet is one of seven letters written with small crowns, called tagin.^[7] Cursive hands let those little ornaments at the tops of the stems go, and wrote a weak flourish of the line instead.^[8] Over the centuries the left-hand stroke of cursive tet was lengthened.^[9]

The Phoenician letter behind tet also gave rise to the Greek theta, Θ.^[10] Russian later wrote a letter corresponding to theta, ѳ, fita,^[11] and the Soviet spelling reform removed it from the alphabet as a duplicate of ф.^[12]