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| Ṯāʾ | |
|---|---|
| Arabic | ث |
| Phonemic representation | θ(t,s) |
| Position in alphabet | 23 |
| Numerical value | 500 |
| Alphabetic derivatives of the Phoenician | |
| Ṯāʾ ثاء | |
|---|---|
| ث | |
| Usage | |
| Writing system | Arabic script |
| Type | Abjad |
| Language of origin | Arabic language |
| Sound values | |
| Alphabetical position | 4 |
| History | |
| Development | 𐤕
|
| Other | |
| Writing direction | Right-to-left |
| This article containsphonetic transcriptions in theInternational Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, seeHelp:IPA. For the distinction between[ ],/ / and ⟨ ⟩, seeIPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters. | |
Ṯāʾ (ث) is the fourth letter of theArabic alphabet,[1] one of the six letters not in the twenty-two akin to thePhoenician alphabet (the others beingḫāʾ,ḏāl,ḍād,ẓāʾ,ġayn). It is related to theAncient North Arabian 𐪛, andSouth Arabian𐩻.
InModern Standard Arabic it represents thevoiceless dental fricative[θ], also found in English as the "th" in words such as "thank" and "thin".InPersian,Urdu, andKurdish it is pronounced as s as in "sister" in English.Ṯāʾ, along those with the lettershīn, are the only two surviving Arabic letters with three dots above. In most European languages, it is mostly romanized as the digraphth. In other languages, such asIndonesian, this Arabic letter is often romanized asts andṠ.
The most common transliteration in English is "th", e.g.Ethiopia (إثيوبيا),thawb (ثوب).
In name and shape, it is a variant oftāʾ (ت).[2] Its numerical value is 500 (seeAbjad numerals).
The Arabic letterث is namedثَاءْṯāʾ. It is written in several ways depending on its position in the word:
| Position in word: | Isolated | Final | Medial | Initial |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Glyph form: (Help) | ث | ـث | ـثـ | ثـ |
In contemporary spoken Arabic, pronunciation of ṯāʾ as[θ] 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 variousvarieties of Arabic: while it is consistently pronounced as thevoiceless dental plosive[t] inMaghrebi Arabic (except Tunisian and eastern Libyan), on the other hand in the Arabic varieties of theMashriq (in the broad sense, including Egyptian, Sudanese and Levantine) andHejazi Arabic, it is pronounced as thesibilantvoiceless alveolar fricative[s] in loanwords from Literary Arabic.
When representing this sound in transliteration of Arabic into Hebrew, it is written as ת׳.
The choice of the lettertāʾ as the base for this letter was not due to etymology (seeHistory of the Arabic alphabet), but rather due to phonetic similarity. For other Semitic cognates of the phonemeṯ seeSound changes between Proto-Semitic and the daughter languages.
Ethiopia is the only country name in Arabic that uses the letter ṯāʾ in its name.
| Voiceless consonants[3] | |||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Proto-Semitic | Old South Arabian | Old North Arabian | Modern South Arabian1, 2 | Standard Arabic | Aramaic | Modern Hebrew | Ge'ez | Phoenician | Akkadian | ||||||
| s₃ (s) | [s]/[ts] | 𐩯 | 𐪏 | /s/ | س | /s/ | ס | s | ס | /s/ | ሰ | s | 𐤎 | s | s |
| s₁ (š) | [ʃ]/[s] | 𐩪 | 𐪊 | /ʃ/,sometimes/h/ | ש | š | שׁ | /ʃ/ | 𐤔 | š | š | ||||
| ṯ | [θ] | 𐩻 | 𐪛 | /θ/ | ث | /θ/ | ש,laterת | *ṯ, š, later t | |||||||
| s₂ (ś) | [ɬ] | 𐩦 | 𐪆 | /ɬ/ | ش | /ʃ/ | ש,laterס | *ś, s | שׂ | /s/ | ሠ | ś | |||
| Preview | ث | |
|---|---|---|
| Unicode name | ARABIC LETTER THEH | |
| Encodings | decimal | hex |
| Unicode | 1579 | U+062B |
| UTF-8 | 216 171 | D8 AB |
| Numeric character reference | ث | ث |
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