Ṯāʾ

Template:Transliteration () is the fourth letter of the Arabic alphabet, one of the six letters not in the twenty-two akin to the Phoenician alphabet (the others being Template:Transliteration, Template:Transliteration, Template:Transliteration, Template:Transliteration, Template:Transliteration). It is related to the Ancient North Arabian 𐪛‎‎‎‎, and South Arabian .

In Modern Standard Arabic it represents the voiceless dental fricative Template:IPAblink, also found in English as the "th" in words such as "thank" and "thin". In Persian, Urdu, and Kurdish it is pronounced as s as in "sister" in English. Ṯāʾ, along those with the letter shīn, are the only two surviving Arabic letters with three dots above. In most European languages, it is mostly romanized as the digraph th. In other languages, such as Indonesian, this Arabic letter is often romanized as ts and Ṡ.

The most common transliteration in English is "th", e.g. Ethiopia (), thawb ().

In name and shape, it is a variant of Template:Transliteration (). Its numerical value is 500 (see Abjad numerals).

The Arabic letter is named ṯāʾ. It is written in several ways depending in its position in the word:

Position in word:	Isolated	Final	Medial	Initial
Glyph form: (Help)	Template:Script/Arabic	Template:Script/Arabic	Template:Script/Arabic	Template:Script/Arabic

In contemporary spoken Arabic, pronunciation of ṯāʾ as Template:IPAblink is found in the Arabian Peninsula, Iraqi, and Tunisian and other dialects and in highly educated pronunciations of Modern Standard and Classical Arabic. Pronunciation of the letter varies between and within the various varieties of Arabic: while it is consistently pronounced as the voiceless dental plosive Template:IPAblink in Maghrebi Arabic (except Tunisian and eastern Libyan), on the other hand in the Arabic varieties of the Mashriq (in the broad sense, including Egyptian, Sudanese and Levantine) and Hejazi Arabic, it is pronounced as the sibilant voiceless alveolar fricative Template:IPAblink in loanwords from Literary Arabic.

When representing this sound in transliteration of Arabic into Hebrew, it is written as ת׳.

Common Semitic perspective

The choice of the letter Template:Transliteration as the base for this letter was not due to etymology (see History of the Arabic alphabet), but rather due to phonetic similarity. For other Semitic cognates of the phoneme Template:Transliteration see Sound changes between Proto-Semitic and the daughter languages.

Ethiopia is the only country name in Arabic that uses the letter ṯāʾ on their name.

Voiceless consonants
Proto-Semitic		Old South Arabian	Old North Arabian	Modern South Arabian 1, 2	Standard Arabic		Aramaic		Modern Hebrew		Ge'ez		Phoenician		Akkadian
s₃ (s)		Template:Script	𐪏		Template:Script		Template:Script	s	Template:Script		Template:Script	s	Template:Script	s	s
s₁ (š)		Template:Script	𐪊	, sometimes			Template:Script	š	Template:Script				Template:Script	š	š
ṯ		Template:Script	𐪛		Template:Script		Template:Script, later Template:Script	*ṯ, š, later t
s₂ (ś)		Template:Script	𐪆		Template:Script		Template:Script, later Template:Script	*ś, s	Template:Script		Template:Script	ś
s₁ (š) is , sometimes and (in Soqotri) - and (for some speakers of Jibbali) ṯ , ḏ and ṯ̣ merge with , , and in Soqotri

See also

• Arabic phonology

References

Template:Arabic-script-stub