Twentieth letter of the Latin alphabet
This article is about the letter of the Latin alphabet. For the same letterform in 🧲 the Cyrillic and Greek alphabets, see Te (Cyrillic) and Tau . For other uses, see T (disambiguation)
T, or t, is 🧲 the 20th letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages 🧲 and others worldwide. Its name in English is tee (pronounced ), plural tees.[1] It is derived from the Semitic Taw 🧲 𐤕 of the Phoenician and Paleo-Hebrew script (Aramaic and Hebrew Taw ת/𐡕/ , Syriac Taw ܬ, and Arabic ت Tāʼ) 🧲 via the Greek letter τ (tau). In English, it is most commonly used to represent the voiceless alveolar plosive, a 🧲 sound it also denotes in the International Phonetic Alphabet. It is the most commonly used consonant and the second-most commonly 🧲 used letter in English-language texts.[2]
History [ edit ]
Phoenician
Taw Etruscan
T Greek
Tau
Taw was the last letter of the Western Semitic and Hebrew 🧲 alphabets. The sound value of Semitic Taw, Greek alphabet Tαυ (Tau), Old Italic and Latin T has remained fairly constant, 🧲 representing [t] in each of these; and it has also kept its original basic shape in most of these alphabets.
Use 🧲 in writing systems [ edit ]
English [ edit ]
In English, ⟨t⟩ usually denotes the voiceless alveolar plosive (International Phonetic Alphabet 🧲 and X-SAMPA: /t/), as in tart, tee, or ties, often with aspiration at the beginnings of words or before stressed 🧲 vowels.
The digraph ⟨ti⟩ often corresponds to the sound /ʃ/ (a voiceless palato-alveolar sibilant) word-medially when followed by a vowel, as 🧲 in nation, ratio, negotiation, and Croatia.
The letter ⟨t⟩ corresponds to the affricate /t͡ʃ/ in some words as a result of 🧲 yod-coalescence (for example, in words ending in "-ture", such as future).
A common digraph is ⟨th⟩, which usually represents a dental 🧲 fricative, but occasionally represents /t/ (as in Thomas and thyme.)
In a few words of modern French origin, the letter T 🧲 is silent at the end of a word; these include croquet and debut.
Other languages [ edit ]
In the orthographies of 🧲 other languages, ⟨t⟩ is often used for /t/, the voiceless dental plosive /t̪/, or similar sounds.
Other systems [ edit ]
In 🧲 the International Phonetic Alphabet, ⟨t⟩ denotes the voiceless alveolar plosive.
Related characters [ edit ]
Descendants and related characters in the Latin 🧲 alphabet [ edit ]
A curly T pictured in the coat of arms of the former Teisko municipality, which was consolidated 🧲 to Tampere.
Ancestors and siblings in other alphabets [ edit ]
𐤕 : Semitic letter Taw, from which the following symbols originally 🧲 derive Τ τ : Greek letter Tau Ⲧ ⲧ : Coptic letter Taw, which derives from Greek Tau Т т 🧲 : Cyrillic letter Te, also derived from Tau 𐍄 : Gothic letter tius, which derives from Greek Tau 𐌕 : 🧲 Old Italic T, which derives from Greek Tau, and is the ancestor of modern Latin T ᛏ : Runic letter 🧲 teiwaz, which probably derives from old Italic T
ፐ : One of the 26 consonantal letters of Ge'ez script. The Ge'ez 🧲 abugida developed under the influence of Christian scripture by adding obligatory vocalic diacritics to the consonantal letters. Pesa ፐ is 🧲 based on Tawe ተ.
Derived signs, symbols and abbreviations [ edit ]
Computing codes [ edit ]
Character information Preview T t Unicode 🧲 name LATIN CAPITAL LETTER T LATIN SMALL LETTER T Encodings decimal hex dec hex Unicode 84 U+0054 116 U+0074 UTF-8 🧲 84 54 116 74 Numeric character reference T T t t EBCDIC family 227 E3 163 A3 ASCII 1 84 🧲 54 116 74
1 Also for encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Macintosh families of encodings.
Other representations 🧲 [ edit ]
Explanatory notes [ edit ]
^ U+A786 Ꞇ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER INSULAR T and U+A787 ꞇ LATIN SMALL LETTER 🧲 INSULAR T are provided for use by phonetics specialists.[5] Unicode treats representation of letters of the Latin alphabet written in 🧲 insular script as a typeface choice that needs no separate coding.andare provided for use by phonetics specialists.
References [ edit ]
