1.
Abjad
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An abjad is a type of writing system where each symbol stands for a consonant, leaving the reader to supply the appropriate vowel. The name abjad is derived from pronouncing the first letters of the Arabic alphabet in order, the ordering of Arabic letters used to match that of the older Hebrew, Phoenician and Semitic alphabets, ʾ b g d. According to the formulations of Daniels, abjads differ from alphabets in that only consonants, abugidas mark the vowels with a diacritic, a minor attachment to the letter, or a standalone glyph. Some abugidas use a symbol to suppress the inherent vowel so that the consonant alone can be properly represented. In a syllabary, a grapheme denotes a syllable, that is. This caused fatal effects on terminology in general and especially in Semitic philology, the first abjad to gain widespread usage was the Phoenician abjad. Unlike other contemporary scripts, such as cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs and this made the script easy to learn, and seafaring Phoenician merchants took the script wherever they went. Phoenician gave rise to a number of new writing systems, including the Greek alphabet and Aramaic, the Greek alphabet evolved into the modern western alphabets, such as Latin and Cyrillic, while Aramaic became the ancestor of many modern abjads and abugidas of Asia. Impure abjads have characters for vowels, optional vowel diacritics. The term pure abjad refers to scripts entirely lacking in vowel indicators and this practice was at first rare and limited in scope, but it became increasingly common and more developed in later times. In the 9th century BC, the Greeks adapted the Phoenician script for use in their own language, the phonetic structure of the Greek language created too many ambiguities when the vowels went unrepresented, so the script was modified. They did not need letters for the sounds represented by aleph, he, heth or ayin. The letters waw and yod were also adapted into vowel signs, along with he, the major innovation of Greek was to dedicate these symbols exclusively and unambiguously to vowel sounds that could be combined arbitrarily with consonants. Abugidas developed along a different route. The basic consonantal symbol was considered to have an inherent a vowel sound, hooks or short lines attached to various parts of the basic letter modify the vowel. In this way, the South Arabian alphabet evolved into the Geez alphabet between the 5th century BC and the 5th century AD, similarly, around the 3rd century BC, the Brāhmī script developed. The other major family of abugidas, Canadian Aboriginal syllabics, was developed in the 1840s by missionary and linguist James Evans for the Cree. Evans used features of Devanagari script and Pitman shorthand to create his initial abugida, later in the 19th century, other missionaries adapted Evans system to other Canadian aboriginal languages
2.
Hebrew language
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Hebrew is a language native to Israel, spoken by over 9 million people worldwide, of whom over 5 million are in Israel. Historically, it is regarded as the language of the Israelites and their ancestors, the earliest examples of written Paleo-Hebrew date from the 10th century BCE. Hebrew belongs to the West Semitic branch of the Afroasiatic language family, Hebrew is the only living Canaanite language left, and the only truly successful example of a revived dead language. Hebrew had ceased to be a spoken language somewhere between 200 and 400 CE, declining since the aftermath of the Bar Kokhba revolt. Aramaic and to a lesser extent Greek were already in use as international languages, especially among elites and it survived into the medieval period as the language of Jewish liturgy, rabbinic literature, intra-Jewish commerce, and poetry. Then, in the 19th century, it was revived as a spoken and literary language, and, according to Ethnologue, had become, as of 1998, the language of 5 million people worldwide. After Israel, the United States has the second largest Hebrew-speaking population, with 220,000 fluent speakers, Modern Hebrew is one of the two official languages of the State of Israel, while premodern Hebrew is used for prayer or study in Jewish communities around the world today. Ancient Hebrew is also the tongue of the Samaritans, while modern Hebrew or Arabic is their vernacular. For this reason, Hebrew has been referred to by Jews as Leshon Hakodesh, the modern word Hebrew is derived from the word Ivri, one of several names for the Israelite people. It is traditionally understood to be a based on the name of Abrahams ancestor, Eber. This name is based upon the root ʕ-b-r meaning to cross over. Interpretations of the term ʕibrim link it to this verb, cross over, in the Bible, the Hebrew language is called Yәhudit because Judah was the surviving kingdom at the time of the quotation. In Isaiah 19,18 it is called the Language of Canaan, Hebrew belongs to the Canaanite group of languages. In turn, the Canaanite languages are a branch of the Northwest Semitic family of languages, according to Avraham ben-Yosef, Hebrew flourished as a spoken language in the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah during about 1200 to 586 BCE. Scholars debate the degree to which Hebrew was a vernacular in ancient times following the Babylonian exile. In July 2008 Israeli archaeologist Yossi Garfinkel discovered a ceramic shard at Khirbet Qeiyafa which he claimed may be the earliest Hebrew writing yet discovered, dating around 3000 years ago. The Gezer calendar also dates back to the 10th century BCE at the beginning of the Monarchic Period, classified as Archaic Biblical Hebrew, the calendar presents a list of seasons and related agricultural activities. The Gezer calendar is written in an old Semitic script, akin to the Phoenician one that through the Greeks, the Gezer calendar is written without any vowels, and it does not use consonants to imply vowels even in the places where later Hebrew spelling requires it
3.
Braille
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Braille /ˈbreɪl/ is a tactile writing system used by people who are blind or visually impaired. It is traditionally written with embossed paper, braille-users can read computer screens and other electronic supports thanks to refreshable braille displays. They can write braille with the slate and stylus or type it on a braille writer, such as a portable braille note-taker. Braille is named after its creator, Frenchman Louis Braille, who lost his eyesight due to a childhood accident, in 1824, at the age of 15, Braille developed his code for the French alphabet as an improvement on night writing. He published his system, which included musical notation, in 1829. The second revision, published in 1837, was the first binary form of writing developed in the modern era, Braille characters are small rectangular blocks called cells that contain tiny palpable bumps called raised dots. The number and arrangement of these dots distinguish one character from another, since the various braille alphabets originated as transcription codes of printed writing systems, the mappings vary from language to language. Braille cells are not the thing to appear in braille text. There may be embossed illustrations and graphs, with the lines either solid or made of series of dots, arrows, bullets that are larger than braille dots, a full Braille cell includes six raised dots arranged in two lateral rows each having three dots. The dot positions are identified by numbers from one through six,64 solutions are possible from using one or more dots. A single cell can be used to represent a letter, number, punctuation mark. In the face of screen-reader software, braille usage has declined, in Barbiers system, sets of 12 embossed dots encoded 36 different sounds. It proved to be too difficult for soldiers to recognize by touch, in 1821 Barbier visited the Royal Institute for the Blind in Paris, where he met Louis Braille. Brailles solution was to use 6-dot cells and to assign a specific pattern to each letter of the alphabet. At first, braille was a transliteration of French orthography, but soon various abbreviations, contractions. The expanded English system, called Grade-2 Braille, was complete by 1905, for blind readers, Braille is an independent writing system, rather than a code of printed orthography. Braille is derived from the Latin alphabet, albeit indirectly, in Brailles original system, the dot patterns were assigned to letters according to their position within the alphabetic order of the French alphabet, with accented letters and w sorted at the end. The first ten letters of the alphabet, a–j, use the upper four dot positions and these stand for the ten digits 1–9 and 0 in a system parallel to Hebrew gematria and Greek isopsephy
4.
English Braille
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English Braille, also known as Grade-2 Braille, is the braille alphabet used for English. It consists of 250 or so letters, numerals, punctuation marks, formatting marks, contractions, some English Braille letters, such as ⠡ ⟨ch⟩, correspond to more than one letter in print. There are three levels of complexity in English Braille, Grade 1 is a one-to-one transcription of printed English, and is restricted to basic literacy. Grade 2, which is universal in print beyond basic literacy materials, abandons one-to-one transcription in many places. Grade 3 is not a system, but any of various personal shorthands. It is almost never found in publications, most of this article describes the 1994 American edition of Grade-2 Braille, which is largely equivalent to British Grade-2 Braille. Some of the differences with Unified English Braille, which was adopted by various countries between 2005 and 2012, are discussed at the end. Braille was originally intended, and is portrayed, as a re-encoding of the English orthography that is used by sighted people. However, for the blind, braille is an independent writing system, Braille was introduced to Britain in 1861. In 1876, a French-based system with a few hundred English contractions and abbreviations was adopted as the predominant script in Great Britain, however, the contractions and abbreviations proved unsatisfactory, and in 1902 the current grade-2 system, called Revised Braille, was adopted in the British Commonwealth. In 1878, the ideal of basing all braille alphabets of the world on the original French alphabetic order was accepted by Britain, Germany, and Egypt. A partially contracted English Braille, Grade 1½, was adopted in Britain in 1918, in 1991, an American proposal was made for Unified English Braille, intended to eliminate the confusion caused by competing standards for academic uses of English Braille. After several design revisions, it has since adopted by the Commonwealth countries starting in 2005. The chief differences with Revised Braille are in punctuation, symbols, and formatting, more accurately reflecting print conventions in matters such as brackets, mathematical notation, the 64 braille patterns are arranged into decades based on the numerical order of those patterns. In addition, for each there are two additional mirror-image patterns, and finally there are three patterns that utilize only the bottom row of the cell. The final pattern, the empty cell ⟨⠀⟩, is used as a space, cells 1 through 25 plus 40 are assigned to the 26 letters of the basic Latin alphabet. The other 37 cells, when they are used at all, are used for punctuation and are typically assigned different values in different languages. The English grade-two values are as follows, cells with dots on only the right side do not have equivalents in printed English, and are explained in the notes
5.
Hebrew alphabet
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Historically, there have been two separate abjad scripts to write Hebrew. In the remainder of this article, the term Hebrew alphabet refers to the Jewish square script unless otherwise indicated, the Hebrew alphabet has 22 letters. It does not have case, but five letters have different forms used at the end of a word. Hebrew is written right to left. Originally, the alphabet was an abjad consisting only of consonants, as with other abjads, such as the Arabic alphabet, scribes later devised means of indicating vowel sounds by separate vowel points, known in Hebrew as niqqud. In both biblical and rabbinic Hebrew, the letters א ה ו י are also used as matres lectionis to represent vowels. There is a trend in modern Modern Hebrew toward the use of matres lectionis to indicate vowels that have traditionally gone unwritten, the paleo-Hebrew alphabet was used in the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah. The Samaritans, who remained in the Land of Israel, continued to use the paleo-Hebrew alphabet, after the fall of the Persian Empire in 330 BCE, Jews used both scripts before settling on the Assyrian form. The square Hebrew alphabet was adapted and used for writing languages of the Jewish diaspora – such as Karaim, the Judeo-Arabic languages, Judaeo-Spanish. In the traditional form, the Hebrew alphabet is an abjad consisting only of consonants and it has 22 letters, five of which use different forms at the end of a word. Also, a system of points to indicate vowels, called niqqud, was developed. In modern forms of the alphabet, as in the case of Yiddish and to some extent Modern Hebrew, today, the trend is toward full spelling with the weak letters acting as true vowels. When used to write Yiddish, vowels are indicated, using letters, either with or without niqqud-diacritics, except for Hebrew words. To preserve the proper vowel sounds, scholars developed several different sets of vocalization, one of these, the Tiberian system, eventually prevailed. Aaron ben Moses ben Asher, and his family for generations, are credited for refining and maintaining the system. These points are used only for special purposes, such as Biblical books intended for study. The Tiberian system also includes a set of marks, called trope. These are shown below the normal form in the following table, although Hebrew is read and written from right to left, the following table shows the letters in order from left to right
6.
Hebrew
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Hebrew is a language native to Israel, spoken by over 9 million people worldwide, of whom over 5 million are in Israel. Historically, it is regarded as the language of the Israelites and their ancestors, the earliest examples of written Paleo-Hebrew date from the 10th century BCE. Hebrew belongs to the West Semitic branch of the Afroasiatic language family, Hebrew is the only living Canaanite language left, and the only truly successful example of a revived dead language. Hebrew had ceased to be a spoken language somewhere between 200 and 400 CE, declining since the aftermath of the Bar Kokhba revolt. Aramaic and to a lesser extent Greek were already in use as international languages, especially among elites and it survived into the medieval period as the language of Jewish liturgy, rabbinic literature, intra-Jewish commerce, and poetry. Then, in the 19th century, it was revived as a spoken and literary language, and, according to Ethnologue, had become, as of 1998, the language of 5 million people worldwide. After Israel, the United States has the second largest Hebrew-speaking population, with 220,000 fluent speakers, Modern Hebrew is one of the two official languages of the State of Israel, while premodern Hebrew is used for prayer or study in Jewish communities around the world today. Ancient Hebrew is also the tongue of the Samaritans, while modern Hebrew or Arabic is their vernacular. For this reason, Hebrew has been referred to by Jews as Leshon Hakodesh, the modern word Hebrew is derived from the word Ivri, one of several names for the Israelite people. It is traditionally understood to be a based on the name of Abrahams ancestor, Eber. This name is based upon the root ʕ-b-r meaning to cross over. Interpretations of the term ʕibrim link it to this verb, cross over, in the Bible, the Hebrew language is called Yәhudit because Judah was the surviving kingdom at the time of the quotation. In Isaiah 19,18 it is called the Language of Canaan, Hebrew belongs to the Canaanite group of languages. In turn, the Canaanite languages are a branch of the Northwest Semitic family of languages, according to Avraham ben-Yosef, Hebrew flourished as a spoken language in the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah during about 1200 to 586 BCE. Scholars debate the degree to which Hebrew was a vernacular in ancient times following the Babylonian exile. In July 2008 Israeli archaeologist Yossi Garfinkel discovered a ceramic shard at Khirbet Qeiyafa which he claimed may be the earliest Hebrew writing yet discovered, dating around 3000 years ago. The Gezer calendar also dates back to the 10th century BCE at the beginning of the Monarchic Period, classified as Archaic Biblical Hebrew, the calendar presents a list of seasons and related agricultural activities. The Gezer calendar is written in an old Semitic script, akin to the Phoenician one that through the Greeks, the Gezer calendar is written without any vowels, and it does not use consonants to imply vowels even in the places where later Hebrew spelling requires it
7.
International uniformity of braille alphabets
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The goal of braille uniformity is to unify the braille alphabets of the world as much as possible, so that literacy in one braille alphabet readily transfers to another. A second round of unification was undertaken under the auspices of UNESCO in 1951, Braille arranged his characters in decades, and assigned the 25 letters of the French alphabet to them in order. The characters beyond the first 25 are the source of variation today. In the first decade, only the top four dots are used, Braille is in its origin a numeric code. Louis Braille applied the characters in order to the French alphabet in alphabetical order. As braille spread to other languages, the order was retained and applied to the local script. Therefore, where the alphabetical order differed from that of French, for example, French was based on a 25-letter alphabet without a w. In the United Kingdom, however, French Braille was adopted without such reordering, therefore, any English book published in braille needed to be typeset separately for the United States and the United Kingdom. Similarly, the letters Egyptian Arabic Braille were assigned their forms based on their nearest French equivalents, so that for example Arabic d had the same braille letters as French d. For Algerian Arabic Braille, however, the characters were assigned to the Arabic alphabet according to the Arabic alphabetical order. Thus an Arabic book published in Algeria was utterly unintelligible to blind Egyptians, with the values of its symbols unaltered from those of the original French. Gradually the various reordered and frequency-based alphabets fell out of use elsewhere as well. For example, Greek γ gamma is written ⠛ g, as it is romanized, not ⠉ c, as it is ordered in the alphabet or as it is related historically to the Latin letter c. Occasional assignments are made on grounds, such as Greek ω omega. Correspondences among the basic letters of representative modern braille alphabets include, the additional letters of the extended French braille alphabet, such as ⠯, are not included in the international standard. The French ⠯, for example, corresponds to print ⟨ç⟩, whereas the ⠯ in English and German braille transcribes ⟨&⟩, and the ⠯ in Hungarian and Albanian braille is ⟨q⟩. Such languages include, Bemba, Chewa, Dobuan, Greenlandic, Huli, Indonesian, Luvale, Malagasy, Malaysian, Ndebele, Shona, Swahili, Swazi, Tok Pisin, Tolai, Xhosa, Zulu. In these languages, print digraphs such as ch are written as digraphs in braille too, languages of the Philippines are augmented with the use of the accent point with n, ⠈⠝, for ñ
8.
JBI International
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Publications are made available in English, Hebrew, Hungarian, Russian, Polish, Romanian, Spanish and Yiddish. The organization maintains a library of books particularly related to Judaism. JBI International was founded as the Jewish Braille Institute of America on April 22,1931, in the Manhattan borough of New York City by Leopold Dubov, with the assistance of Rabbi Michael Aaronson. JBI was funded in part by the National Federation of Temple Sisterhoods. It also intended to adapt the Moon type writing system into Yiddish and Hebrew, other focuses included the religious instruction of blind Jewish children and the development of a Braille library for blind Jewish people of all ages. By 1932, the JBI had begun publication of its monthly The Jewish Braille Review, one of the primary challenges faced by the JBI was the lack of a uniform Hebrew Braille. One of the masters of the new alphabet, Mrs. Harry A. Cole of Cleveland. She worked on the task of translation single-handedly for five years, although proofreaders scrutinized her work, in 1950, JBI International published the first Braille Torah. In 1955, the JBI began a drive to help blind Jewish children achieve maturity in the Jewish faith through direct intervention or correspondence courses, as the institution grew, it relocated several times. In 1953, it moved to 101 West Fifty-fifth Street, by 1961, it housed in its library there 10,000 books in Braille as well as an extensive collection of audio books. In 1968, it moved again to 110 East 30th Street in Manhattan, in 1972, when its library consisted of over 20,000 volumes, the new headquarters made press by developing a touch-and-smell fragrance garden on its grounds for the benefit of the blind. At that time, the JBI facilities also included a sound studio wherein it could produce its audio books, the Institution was renamed in 2001
9.
Library of Congress
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The Library of Congress is the research library that officially serves the United States Congress and is the de facto national library of the United States. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States, the Library is housed in three buildings on Capitol Hill in Washington, D. C. it also maintains the Packard Campus in Culpeper, Virginia, which houses the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center. The Library of Congress claims to be the largest library in the world and its collections are universal, not limited by subject, format, or national boundary, and include research materials from all parts of the world and in more than 450 languages. Two-thirds of the books it acquires each year are in other than English. The Library of Congress moved to Washington in 1800, after sitting for years in the temporary national capitals of New York. John J. Beckley, who became the first Librarian of Congress, was two dollars per day and was required to also serve as the Clerk of the House of Representatives. The small Congressional Library was housed in the United States Capitol for most of the 19th century until the early 1890s, most of the original collection had been destroyed by the British in 1814, during the War of 1812. To restore its collection in 1815, the bought from former president Thomas Jefferson his entire personal collection of 6,487 books. After a period of growth, another fire struck the Library in its Capitol chambers in 1851, again destroying a large amount of the collection. The Library received the right of transference of all copyrighted works to have two copies deposited of books, maps, illustrations and diagrams printed in the United States. It also began to build its collections of British and other European works and it included several stories built underground of steel and cast iron stacks. Although the Library is open to the public, only high-ranking government officials may check out books, the Library promotes literacy and American literature through projects such as the American Folklife Center, American Memory, Center for the Book, and Poet Laureate. James Madison is credited with the idea for creating a congressional library, part of the legislation appropriated $5,000 for the purchase of such books as may be necessary for the use of Congress. And for fitting up an apartment for containing them. Books were ordered from London and the collection, consisting of 740 books and 3 maps, was housed in the new Capitol, as president, Thomas Jefferson played an important role in establishing the structure of the Library of Congress. The new law also extended to the president and vice president the ability to borrow books and these volumes had been left in the Senate wing of the Capitol. One of the only congressional volumes to have survived was a government account book of receipts and it was taken as a souvenir by a British Commander whose family later returned it to the United States government in 1940. Within a month, former president Jefferson offered to sell his library as a replacement
10.
Talmud
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The Talmud is a central text of Rabbinic Judaism. It is also referred to as Shas, a Hebrew abbreviation of shisha sedarim, the six orders. Talmud translates literally as instruction in Hebrew, and the term may refer to either the Gemara alone, or the Mishnah, the entire Talmud consists of 63 tractates, and in standard print is over 6,200 pages long. The Talmud is the basis for all codes of Jewish law, Rabbis expounded and debated the Torah and discussed the Tanakh without the benefit of written works, though some may have made private notes, for example of court decisions. It is during this period that rabbinic discourse began to be recorded in writing, the earliest recorded oral Torah may have been of the midrashic form, in which halakhic discussion is structured as exegetical commentary on the Pentateuch. But an alternative form, organized by subject matter instead of by biblical verse, became dominant about the year 200 CE, the Oral Torah was far from monolithic, rather, it varied among various schools. The most famous two were the School of Shammai and the School of Hillel, in general, all valid opinions, even the non-normative ones, were recorded in the Talmud. The oldest full manuscript of the Talmud, known as the Munich Talmud, each tractate is divided into chapters,517 in total, that are both numbered according to the Hebrew alphabet and given names, usually using the first one or two words in the first mishnah. A perek may continue over several pages, each perek will contain several mishnayot with their accompanying exchanges that form the building-blocks of the Gemara, the name for a passage of gemara is a sugya. A sugya, including baraita or tosefta, will comprise a detailed proof-based elaboration of a Mishnaic statement. A sugya may, and often does, range widely off the subject of the mishnah, in a given sugya, scriptural, Tannaic and Amoraic statements are cited to support the various opinions. In so doing, the Gemara will highlight semantic disagreements between Tannaim and Amoraim, and compare the Mishnaic views with passages from the Baraita. Rarely are debates formally closed, in instances, the final word determines the practical law. There is a literature on the procedural principles to be used in settling the practical law when disagreements exist, see under #Logic. The Mishnah is a compilation of legal opinions and debates, statements in the Mishnah are typically terse, recording brief opinions of the rabbis debating a subject, or recording only an unattributed ruling, apparently representing a consensus view. The rabbis recorded in the Mishnah are known as the Tannaim, the Mishnahs topical organization thus became the framework of the Talmud as a whole. But not every tractate in the Mishnah has a corresponding Gemara, also, the order of the tractates in the Talmud differs in some cases from that in the Mishnah. In addition to the Mishnah, other tannaitic teachings were current at about the time or shortly thereafter
11.
Aleph
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Aleph is the first letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician Ālep, Hebrew Ālef א, Aramaic Ālap
12.
Bet (letter)
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This letters name means house in various Semitic languages, and appears to derive from an Egyptian hieroglyph of a house by acrophony. The Phoenician letter gave rise to, among others, the Greek Beta, Latin B, the Arabic letter ب is named باء bāʾ. For /p/, it may be used interchangeably with the Persian letter پ - pe in this case, Hebrew spelling, בֵּית The Hebrew letter represents two different phonemes, a b sound and a v sound. The two are distinguished by a dot in the centre of the letter for /b/ and no dot for /v/ and it is also named beth, following the Tiberian Hebrew pronunciation, in academic circles. In modern Hebrew the frequency of the usage of bet, out of all the letters, is 4. 98%, when the Bet has a dot in its center, known as a dagesh, then it represents /b/. There are various rules in Hebrew grammar that stipulate when and why a dagesh is used, when this letter appears as ב without the dagesh in its center then it represents a voiced labiodental fricative, /v/. Bet in gematria symbolizes the number 2, as a prefix, the letter bet may function as a preposition meaning in, at, or with. Bet is the first letter of the Torah, as Bet is the number 2 in gematria, this is said to symbolize that there are two parts to Torah, the Written Torah and the Oral Torah. In set theory, the numbers stand for powers of infinite sets. In the Syriac alphabet, the letter is ܒ — Beth. It is one of six letters that represents two associated sounds, when Beth has a hard pronunciation it is a. When Beth has a soft pronunciation it is pronounced as a. However, in dialects, the soft Beth is more often pronounced as a. Whether Beth should be pronounced as a hard or soft sound is determined by its context within a word. However, wherever it is traditionally geminate within a word, even in dialects that no longer distinguish double consonants, in the West Syriac dialect, some speakers always pronounce Beth with its hard sound. Beth, when attached to the beginning of a word, represents the preposition in, with, as a numeral, the letter represents the number 2, and, using various systems of dashes above or below, can stand for 2,000 and 20,000
13.
Gimel
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Gimel is the third letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician Gīml, Hebrew ˈGimel ג, Aramaic Gāmal, Syriac Gāmal ܓ, and Arabic ǧīm ج. The Arabic letter ج is named جيم ǧīm, differences in pronunciation occur, because speakers of Modern Standard Arabic pronounce words in accordance to their spoken variety of Arabic. In such varieties, cognate words will have consistent differences in pronunciation of this sound, In most of the Arabian Peninsula, Algeria, Iraq, yet in Algeria and the Arabian Peninsula it may be softened to in some environments. In most of the Levant and north west Africa, in some regions of Sudan, Yemen and Sindh, another common reconstruction of the Classical Arabic pronunciation. This pronunciation also exist in north west Africa in words that contain grooved alveolar sounds, in Gulf Arabic, in the most colloquial speech, while and sometimes softened to in Literary Arabic pronunciation. Egyptians always use the letter to represent, as well as in names and loanwords, however, it isnt incorrect to use it in Egypt for transcribing /ʒ/~/d͡ʒ/. The opposite isnt incorrect among other Arabic language speakers, in Perso-Arabic script, it is called jīm. In Egypt, when there is a need to transcribe /ʒ/ or /d͡ʒ/, in Persian, Urdu, Sindhi, Ottoman Turkish and other languages using Perso-Arabic script, چ represents the affricate /t͡ʃ/. Hebrew spelling, גִּימֵל Bertrand Russell posits that the form is a conventionalized image of a camel. The letter may be the shape of the animals head, neck. Powell, a specialist in the history of writing, states It is hard to imagine how gimel = camel can be derived from the picture of a camel, Gimel is one of the six letters which can receive a dagesh. The two functions of dagesh are distinguished as either qal or hazaq, the six letters are bet, gimel, daled, kaph, pe, and taf. Three of them have their value changed in modern Hebrew from the fricative to the plosive by adding a dagesh. The other three represent the pronunciation in modern Hebrew, but have had alternate pronunciations at other times and places. They are essentially pronounced in the fricative as ג gh غ, dh ذ, in the Temani pronunciation, gimel represents /ɡ/, /ʒ/, or /d͡ʒ/ when with a dagesh, and /ɣ/ without a dagesh. In modern Hebrew, the combination ג׳ is used in loanwords, in gematria, gimel represents the number three. The word gimel is related to gemul, which means justified repayment, or the giving of reward, Gimel is also one of the seven letters which receive special crowns when written in a Sefer Torah. See shin, ayin, teth, nun, zayin, in Modern Hebrew, the frequency of usage of gimel, out of all the letters, is 1. 26%
14.
Dalet
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Dalet is the fourth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician Dālet, Hebrew Dālet ד, Aramaic Dālath, Syriac Dālaṯ ܕ, and Arabic Dāl د. Its sound value is a voiced alveolar plosive, the letter is named dāl, and is written in several ways depending on its position in the word, The letter represents a /d/ sound. Hebrew spelling, דָּלֶת The letter is dalet in the modern Israeli Hebrew pronunciation, dales is still used by many Ashkenazi Jews and daleth by some Jews of Middle-Eastern background, especially in the diaspora. In some academic circles, it is called daleth, following the Tiberian Hebrew pronunciation, the ד like the English D represents a voiced alveolar stop. Just as in English, there may be subtle varieties of the sound that are created when it is spoken, dalet can receive a dagesh, being one of the 6 letters that can receive Dagesh Kal. There are minor variations to this pronunciation, such as ד dhalet /d/ or דּ dalet /d/. In addition, in modern Hebrew, the combination ד׳ is used when transcribing foreign names to denote /ð/, in gematria, dalet symbolizes the number four. The letter dalet, along with the He is used to represent the Names of God in Judaism, the letter He is used commonly, and the dalet is rarer. A good example is the keter of a tallit, which has the blessing for donning the tallit, a reason for this is that the He is used as an abbreviation for HaShem The Name and the dalet is used as a non-sacred way of referring to God. 59%. In the Syriac alphabet, the letter is ܕ — dolath in western pronunciation, dalath. It is one of six letters that represents two associated sounds, when daled/dolath has a hard pronunciation it is a. When it has a soft pronunciation it is pronounced as a. The letter is common in Syriac as it is often attached to the beginning of words as the relative pronoun. Daled/dolath is always written with a point below it to distinguish it from the letter resh, as a numeral, dalad/dolath stands for the number four. With various systems of dots and dashes, it can stand for 4,000 and 40,000
15.
He (letter)
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He is the fifth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician Hē, Hebrew Hē ה, Aramaic Hē, Syriac Hē ܗ, and Arabic Hāʾ ﻫ. Its sound value is a glottal fricative. The proto-Canaanite letter gave rise to the Greek Epsilon, Etruscan
16.
Waw (letter)
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Waw is the sixth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician wāw, Aramaic waw, Hebrew vav ו, Syriac waw ܘ and Arabic wāw و. It represents the consonant and the vowels and and it is the origin of Greek Ϝ, Υ and Latin F, V and the derived letters U, W, Y. The preceding consonant could either have no diacritic or a mark, damma. A long /oː/ In many dialects, as a result of the monophthongization that underwent the diphthong /aw/ in most of the words, a part of a diphthong, /aw/. In this case it has no diacritic, but could be marked with a sukun in some traditions, the preceding consonant could either have no diacritic or have fatḥa sign, hinting to the first vowel /a/ in the diphthong. As a vowel, wāw can serve as the carrier of a hamza, wāw serves several functions in Arabic. Perhaps foremost among them is that it is the conjunction in Arabic, equivalent to and, it is usually prefixed to other conjunctions, such as وَلَكِن wa-lākin, meaning. Another function is the oath, by preceding a noun of great significantly valued by the speaker and it is often literally translatable to By. or I swear to. And is often used in the Quran in this way, with an additional triple dot diacritic above waw, the letter then named ve is used to represent distinctively the consonant /v/ sometimes in Arabic-based Sorani Kurdish and in Arabic-based Uyghur. /o/ in Sorani Kurdish, /v/ in Arabic-based Kazakh, /ø/ in Uyghur, thirty-fourth letter of the Azerbaijani Arabic script, represents Ô /ɔ/. In Jawi script, Used for /v/. 00% and it is pronounced, like in Arabic, as a by some Jews of Mizrahi origin. In modern Israeli Hebrew, some loanwords, the pronunciation of whose source contains /w/, modern Hebrew has no standardized way to distinguish orthographically between and. The pronunciation is determined by prior knowledge or must be derived through context, some non standard spellings of the sound are sometimes found in modern Hebrew texts, such as word-initial double-vav, וואללה – /ˈwala/ or, rarely, vav with a geresh, ו׳יליאם – /ˈwiljam/. Vav can be used as a mater lectionis for an o vowel, in case it is known as a ḥolam male. The distinction is normally ignored and the HEBREW POINT HOLAM is used in all cases and this vowel can be denoted without the vav, as just the dot placed above and to the left of the letter it points, and is called then ḥolam ḥaser. Some inadequate typefaces dont support the distinction between the ḥolam male ⟨וֹ⟩ /o/, the consonantal vav pointed with a ḥolam ḥaser ⟨וֺ⟩ /vo/. In the word שִׁוּוּק, marketing, the first denotes a vav with dagesh and this is the most common usage. For example, yomar means he will say and vayomar means he said, for example, ahavtah means you loved, and veahavtah means you will love
17.
Zayin
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Zayin is the seventh letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician Zayin, Hebrew Zayin ז, Aramaic Zain, Syriac Zayn ܙ, and Arabic Zayn ز. The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek zeta, Etruscan z, Latin Z, the Phoenician letter appears to be named after a sword or other weapon. In Biblical Hebrew, zayin means sword, and the verb means to arm. The Proto-Sinaitic glyph may have been called ziqq, based on a hieroglyph depicting a manacle, the same letter has another name – ze – in a number of languages, such as Persian. It also has a version, ژ Persian pronunciation, which is used in Persian, Pashto, Kurdish, Urdu. In modern Hebrew the frequency of the usage of zayin, out of all the letters, is 0. 88%, Hebrew spelling, זַיִן In modern Hebrew, the combination ז׳ is used in loanwords and foreign names to denote as in vision. In gematria, zayin represents the seven, and when used at the beginning of Hebrew years it means 7000. Zayin is also one of the seven letters which receive a special crown when written in a Sefer Torah, besides ʻayin, gimel, teth, nun, shin and it is one of several Hebrew letters that have an additional meaning as a noun. Zain is a consonant with the /z/ sound which is an alveolar fricative. ڤ - Ve پ - Pe گ - Gāf چ - Che
18.
Heth
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Ḥet or H̱et is the eighth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician Ḥēt, Hebrew Ḥēt ח, Aramaic Ḥēth, Syriac Ḥēṯ ܚ, and Arabic Ḥā ح. Heth originally represented a voiceless fricative, either pharyngeal /ħ/, or velar /x/, in Arabic, two corresponding letters were created for both phonemic sounds, unmodified ḥāʾ ح represents /ħ/, while ḫāʾ خ represents /x/. The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek Eta Η, Etruscan, Latin H, while H is a consonant in the Latin alphabet, the Greek and Cyrillic equivalents represent vowel sounds. The letter shape ultimately goes back to a hieroglyph for courtyard, the Modern Hebrew word for courtyard is Hatzer. While the name goes back to ḫayt, the name reconstructed for a letter derived from a hieroglyph for thread. The corresponding South Arabian letters are ḥ and ḫ, corresponding to Geez Ḥauṭ ሐ, the letter is named حاء ḥāʾ and is the sixth letter of the alphabet. Its shape varies depending on its position in the word, This letter used to two letters, the second being خḫāʾ. In Arabic, ḥāʾ is similar to the English, but it is much raspier, IPA, in Persian, it is, like ⟨ﻫ⟩ and the English h. In more rare phonologies, it is pronounced as a voiceless fricative and is still among Mizrahim. Ḥet is one of the few Hebrew consonants that can take a vowel at the end of a word and this occurs when patach gnuva comes under the Ḥet at the end of the word. The combination is then pronounced /-aχ/ rather than /-χa/, Ḥet, along with Aleph, Ayin, Resh, and He, cannot receive a dagesh. As pharyngeal fricatives are difficult for most English speakers to pronounce, thus challah, pronounced by native Hebrew speakers as /χala/ or /ħala/ is pronounced /halə/ by most English speakers, who cannot often perceive the difference between and. In gematria, Ḥet represents the number eight, in chat rooms, online forums, and social networking the letter Ḥet repeated denotes laughter, just as in english, in the saying Haha. Ħ, ħ, Latin letter H with stroke
19.
Teth
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Teth, also written as Ṭēth or Tet, is the ninth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician Ṭēt, Hebrew Ṭēt ט, Aramaic Ṭēth, Syriac Ṭēṯ ܛ, and Arabic Ṭāʾ ط. It is 16th in modern Arabic order, the Persian Ța is pronounced as a hard t sound and is the 19th letter in the modern Persian alphabet. The Phoenician letter also gave rise to the Greek theta, originally an aspirated voiceless alveolar stop, the sound value of Teth is /tˤ/, one of the Semitic emphatic consonants. The letter is named ṭāʾ, Modern Standard Arabic pronunciation, /tˤ/, in gematria, Tet represents the number nine. When followed by an apostrophe, it means 9,000, the most common example of this usage is in the numbers of the Hebrew years. As well, in gematria, the number 15 is written with Tet and Vav, to avoid the normal construction Yud, similarly,16 is written with Tet and Zayin instead of Yud and Vav to avoid spelling part of the Tetragrammaton. Tet is also one of the seven letters which receive special crowns when written in a Sefer Torah, see Shin, Ayin, Gimmel, Nun, Zayin, and Tzadi. A symbol similar to the Phoenician teth is used for the product, as ⊗. The Hebrew ט is also similar to the letter Ʋ
20.
Yodh
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Yodh is the tenth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician Yōd, Hebrew Yōd י, Aramaic Yodh, Syriac Yōḏ ܚ, and Arabic Yāʾ ي. Its sound value is /j/ in all languages for which it is used, in languages, it also serves as a long vowel. The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek Iota, Latin I, J, Cyrillic І, Й, Coptic iauda, Yodh is thought to have originated with a pictograph of a hand that ultimately derives from Proto-Semitic *yad-. It may be related to the Egyptian hieroglyphic of an arm, a long /iː/ usually in the middle or end of words. In this case it has no diacritic, but could be marked with a kasra in the letter in some traditions. A long /eː/ In many dialects, as a result of the monophthongization that underwent the diphthong /aj/ in most of the words, a part of a diphthong, /aj/. Then, it has no diacritic but could be marked with a sukun in some traditions, the preceding consonant could have no diacritic or have fatḥa sign, hinting to the first vowel in the diphthong, i. e. /a/. As a vowel, yāʾ can serve as the seat of the hamza, Yāʾ as a prefix is the marker for a singular imperfective verb, as in يَكْتُب yaktub he writes from the root ك-ت-ب K-T-B. Yāʾ with a shadda is particularly used to turn a noun into an adjective, for instance, مِصْر Miṣr → مِصْرِيّ Miṣriyy. The transformation can be abstract, for instance, مَوْضَوع mawḍūʿ → مَوْضُوعِيّ mawḍūʿiyy. Still other uses of this function can be a bit further from the root, the common pronunciation of the final /-ijj/ is most often pronounced as or. A form similar to but distinguished from yāʾ is the ʾalif maqṣūrah broken alif and it indicates a final long /aː/. In Egypt, Sudan and sometimes the Maghreb, the form is always ى. ى representing final /-aː/ is less likely to occur in Modern Standard Arabic, in this case, it is commonly known as, especially in Egypt, أَلِف لَيِّنَة ʾalif layyinah. In Egypt, it is short if used in Egyptian Arabic and most commonly short in Modern Standard Arabic. In the Persian alphabet, the letter is generally called ye following Persian-language custom, in its final form, the letter does not have dots, much like the Arabic ʾalif maqṣūrah or, more to the point, much like the custom in Egypt, Sudan and sometimes Maghreb. On account of this difference, Perso-Arabic ye is located at a different Unicode code point than both of the standard Arabic letters, in computers, the Persian version of the letter automatically appears with two dots initially and medially. The Arabic version without dots ى is not used initially or medially, however, it is used in the Uyghur Arabic alphabet and the Arabic-based Kyrgyz alphabet
21.
Lamedh
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Lamed or Lamedh is the twelfth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician Lāmed, Hebrew Lāmed ל, Aramaic Lāmadh, Syriac Lāmaḏ ܠ, and Arabic Lām ل. The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek Lambda, Latin L, the letter is usually considered to have originated from the representation of a goad, i. e. a cattle prod, or a shepherds stick, i. e. a pastoral staff. The letter is named lām, and is written in several ways depending on its position in the word, Lām is used as a prefix in two different ways. Lām-kasra is essentially a preposition meaning to or for, as in لِوالدي liwālidī and this construction is virtually semantically identical the equivalent in most Romance languages, e. g. French pourquoi, Spanish por qué, and Italian perché. Hebrew spelling, לָמֶד Lamed transcribes as a lateral approximant /l/. Lamed in gematria represents the number 30, with the letter Vav it refers to the Lamedvavniks, the 36 righteous people who save the world from destruction. As an abbreviation, it can stand for litre, also, a sign on a car with a Lamed on it means that the driver is a student of driving. As a prefix, it can have two purposes, It can be attached to roots, designating the infinitive. It can also act as a meaning to or for
22.
Mem
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Mem is the thirteenth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician Mēm, Hebrew Mēm מ, Aramaic Mem, Syriac Mīm ܡܡ, and Arabic Mīm م. The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek Mu, Etruscan, Latin M, and Cyrillic М. The letter is named mīm, and is written in several ways depending on its position in the word, Some examples on its uses in Modern Standard Arabic, Mīm is used in the creation of ism words. Specifically, mīm is used in the creation of the masdar of Stem III verbs, place-nouns are also created with mīm, the pattern mafal is used to create maktab office from the triliteral k-t-b and maṣna factory from ṣ-n-. Hebrew spelling, מֵם Mem represents a bilabial nasal, in Hebrew, Mem, like Kaph, Nun, Pe, and Tzadi, has a final form, used at the end of words, its shape changes from מ to ם. In gematria, Mem represents the number 40 in both the Standard and Mispar Gadol Methods of Gematria, However, final mems value is 40 in the Standard Method and 600 in the Mispar Gadol method. The Standard Method adds the values of Tav and Resh to denote the value of mem sofit, in the Sefer Yetzirah, the letter Mem is King over Water, Formed Earth in the Universe, Cold in the Year, and the Belly in the Soul. As an abbreviation, it stands for metre, in the Israeli army it can also stand for mefaked, commander. In Hebrew religious texts, it can stand for the name of God Makom, Mem is associated with The Hanged Man, the element of water and the path between Geburah and Hod on the Tree of Life
23.
Nun (letter)
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Nun is the fourteenth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician Nūn, Hebrew Nun נ, Aramaic Nun, Syriac Nūn ܢܢ, and Arabic Nūn ن. It is the letter in Thaana, pronounced as noonu. The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek nu, Etruscan, Latin N, Nun is believed to be derived from an Egyptian hieroglyph of a snake or eel. Some have hypothesized a hieroglyph of fish in water as its origin, naḥš in modern Arabic literally means bad luck. The cognate letter in Geez and descended Semitic languages of Ethiopia is nehas, Nūn is also used as the prefix for first-person plural imperfective/present tense verbs. Thus هُوَ يَكْتُب huwwa yaktub → نَحْنُ نَكْتُب naḥnu naktub, the Arabic letter nūn became associated with the spray-painting of nūn for Nasrani on the gateposts of Christian houses in Isis-held areas of Iraq. It is retroflex nasal consonantal sound symbol, used in spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ɳ⟩, like all the retroflex consonants, the IPA symbol is formed by adding a rightward-pointing hook extending from the bottom of an en. Saraiki uses the letter ⟨ݨ⟩ for /ɳ/ and it is a compound of nūn and rre. For example, کݨ مݨ، چھݨ چھݨ، ونڄݨ۔ After the fall of Mosul, ISIL demanded Assyrian Christians in the city to convert to Islam, pay tribute, ISIL begun marking homes of Christian residents with the letter nūn for Nassarah. Thousands of Christians, Yazidis and other, mostly Shia, Muslims abandoned their homes, some Christians changed their profile pictures on Facebook and Twitter to pictures of the letter ن as a symbol of support. The letter ن, in relation to social media campaign, is being called the Mark of the Nazarene from naṣrānī. The word naṣārā comes from Classical Arabic, the more common term used to refer to Christians in Modern Standard Arabic is masihi, whereas the Quranic naṣārā may now be used to mean foreigners of European origin regardless of religion. Hebrew spelling, נוּן Nun represents a nasal, like the English letter N. Nun, like Kaph, Mem, Pe. Its shape changes from נ to ן, there are also nine instances of an inverted nun in the Tanakh. In gematria, Nun represents the number 50 and its final form represents 700 but this is rarely used, Tav and Shin being used instead. As in Arabic, nun as an abbreviation can stand for neqevah, in medieval Rabbinic writings, Nun Sophit stood for Son of. Nun is also one of the seven letters which receive a special crown when written in a Sefer Torah, see Shin, Ayin, Teth, Gimmel, Zayin, and Tzadi
24.
Samekh
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Samekh or Simketh is the fifteenth letter of many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician Ṣāmek, Hebrew ˈSamekh ס, Aramaic Semkath, Syriac Semkaṯ ܣ, representing /s/. The Arabic alphabet, however, uses a letter based on Phoenician Šīn to represent /s/, however, the Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek Xi. The origin of Samekh is unclear, Hebrew spelling, סָמֶךְ Samekh represents a voiceless alveolar fricative /s/. Unlike most Semitic consonants, the pronunciation of /s/ remains constant between vowels and before voiced consonants, Samekh in gematria has the value 60. Samekh and Mem form the abbreviation for the Angel of Death, in some legends, samekh is said to have been a miracle of the Ten Commandments. Exodus 32,15 records that the tablets were written on both their sides, the Jerusalem Talmud interprets this as meaning that the inscription went through the full thickness of the tablets. The stone in the parts of the letters ayin and teth should have fallen out, as it was not connected to the rest of the tablet. However, this would be appropriate for the Rabbis who maintained that the Torah or the Ten Commandments were given in the later Hebrew Assyrian script
25.
Ayin
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Ayin or Ayn is the sixteenth letter of the Semitic abjad, including Phoenician ʿayin, Hebrew ʿayin ע, Aramaic ʿē, Syriac ʿē ܥ, and Arabic ʿayn ع. ﻉ comes twenty‐first in the Persian alphabet and eighteenth in the order of Arabic. The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek Ο, Latin O, the sound represented by ayin is common to much of the Afroasiatic language family, such as in the Egyptian language, the Cushitic languages and the Semitic languages. Some scholars believe that the sound in Proto-Indo-European transcribed h3 was similar, ʿayin is usually transliterated into the Latin alphabet with ʿ, modifier letter left half ring, such as in the DIN31635 romanization of Arabic. This symbol originated from Semitic romanization and the transliteration of Ancient Egyptian, there, it was inspired by the Greek rough breathing mark. However, such substitutions obviously may cause confusion, such as with the glottal stop consonant hamza, specifically for use in transliterating Ancient Egyptian, Ꜥ and ꜥ were added to the Latin Extended-D range in Unicode version 5.1. Maltese, which uses a Latin alphabet, the only Semitic language to do so in its standard form and it is usually unvocalized in speech. The Somali Latin alphabet represents the ʿayin with the letter c, the informal way to represent it in Arabic chat alphabet uses the digit 3 as transliteration. The Arabic letter ﻉ is the letter of the alphabet. It is written in one of several ways depending on its position in the word, depending on the region, it ranges from a pharyngeal to an epiglottal. It is voiced, its unvoiced counterpart being ح, in Persian language and other languages using the Persian alphabet, it is pronounced as /ʔ/, and rarely as /ʁ/ in some languages. As in Hebrew, the letter stood for two sounds, /ʕ/ and /ʁ/. When pointing was developed, the sound /ʁ/ was distinguished with a dot on top, in Maltese, which is written with the Latin alphabet, the digraph għ, called ʿajn, is used to write what was originally the same sound. Hebrew spelling, עַיִן ʿayin, along with Aleph, Resh, ʿayin has traditionally been described as a voiced pharyngeal fricative. In some historical Sephardi and Ashkenazi pronunciations, ʿayin represented a velar nasal, in Israeli Hebrew, it represents a glottal stop in certain cases but is usually silent. However, changes in adjoining vowels often testify to the presence of a pharyngeal or epiglottal articulation. As well, it may be used as a shibboleth to identify the background of a speaker, as Mizrahim. Ayin is also one of the three letters that can take a furtive patach / patach ganuv, in Hebrew loanwords in Greek and Latin, ʿayin is sometimes reflected as /g/, since the biblical phonemes /ʕ/ and /ʁ/ were both represented in Hebrew writing by the letter ʿayin
26.
Pe (letter)
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Pe is the seventeenth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician Pē, Hebrew Pē פ, Aramaic Pē, Syriac Pē ܦ, and Arabic Fāʼ ف and also Persian Peʼ پ. The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek Pi, Latin P, Pe is usually assumed to come from a pictogram of a mouth. The letter ﻑ is named ﻓﺎء fāʾ. g and it may be used interchangeably with the modified letter ﭪ - ve in this case. In the process of developing from Proto-Semitic, Proto-Semitic /p/ became Arabic /f/, examples on usage in Modern Standard Arabic, Fāʾ-fatḥah is a multi-function prefix most commonly equivalent to so or so that. For example, نَكْتُب naktub → فَنَكْتُب fanaktub, in Persian, it uses پ to represent the phoneme Voiceless bilabial stop /p/ The Persian alphabet has taken the shape of ba’ but it has three dots below instead. In the Maghreb, the dot in fāʼ is written underneath, once the prevalent style, it is now only used in Maghribi countries for writing Quran, with the exception of Libya and Algeria, which adopted the Mashriqi form. The Maghrebi alphabet has taken the shape of fa’ to mean qāf instead and it is also romanized pey, especially when used in Yiddish. The letter Pe is one of the six letters which can receive a Dagesh Kal, the six are Bet, Gimel, Daleth, Kaph, Pe, and Tav. There are two variants of this letter which indicate a different pronunciation, When the Pe has a dot in its center, known as a dagesh, it represents a voiceless bilabial plosive. There are various rules in Hebrew grammar that stipulate when and why a dagesh is used, when Pe appears without the dagesh dot in its center, then it usually represents a voiceless labiodental fricative /f/. At the end of words, the written form changes to a Pe/Fe Sophit. When a word in modern Hebrew borrowed from another language ends with /p/ and this is because native Hebrew words, which always use the final form at the end, cannot end in /p/. In gematria, Pe represents the number 80 and its final form represents 800 but this is rarely used, Tav written twice being used instead
27.
Tsade
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Ṣade is the eighteenth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician Çādē, Hebrew Ṣādi צ, Aramaic Ṣāḏē, Syriac Ṣāḏē ܨ, Geez Ṣädäy ጸ, and Arabic Ṣād ص. Its oldest sound value is probably /sˤ/, although there is a variety of pronunciation in different modern Semitic languages and it represents the coalescence of three Proto-Semitic emphatic consonants in Canaanite. Arabic, which kept the separate, introduced variants of ṣād. In Aramaic, these emphatic consonants coalesced instead with ʿayin and ṭēt, respectively, the Phoenician letter is continued in the Greek San and possibly Sampi, and in Etruscan
28.
Qoph
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Qoph or Qop is the nineteenth letter of the Semitic abjads. Aramaic Qop is derived from the Phoenician letter, and derivations from Aramaic include Hebrew Qof ק, Syriac Qōp̄ ܩ and its original sound value was a West Semitic emphatic stop, presumably or. In Hebrew gematria, it has the value of 100. The origin of the shape of qōp is uncertain. It is usually suggested to have originally depicted either a needle, specifically the eye of a needle, or the back of a head. According to a suggestion, it may also have been a picture of a monkey. Besides Aramaic Qop, which rise to the letter in the Semitic abjads used in classical antiquity, Phoenician qōp is also the origin of the Latin letter Q. The Arabic letter ق is named قاف qāf and it is written is several ways depending in its position in the word, It is usually transliterated into Latin script as q, though some scholarly works use ḳ. According to Sibawayh, author of the first book on Arabic grammar, in Hejazi Arabic, Najdi Arabic, Gulf Arabic, Libyan Arabic, rural Jordan, Southern Mesopotamian Arabic and some forms of Yemeni and Saidi Arabic and partially in Maghrebi dialects. In Egyptian Arabic, as well as Levantine Arabic and forms of Algerian Arabic and Moroccan Arabic from around Tlemcen, in Sudanese Arabic and some forms of Yemeni Arabic. In rural Palestinian Arabic it is pronounced as a voiceless velar plosive. Optionally in Iraqi and in Gulf Arabic, it is pronounced as a voiced postalveolar affricate. Note, however, that most dialects of Arabic do use the sound for this letter when it is found in learned words borrowed from standard Arabic into the respective dialect. The Maghrebi style of writing qāf is different, having only a point above. The earliest Arabic manuscripts show qāf in several variants, pointed or unpointed, within Maghribi texts, there is no possibility of confusing it with the letter fāʼ, as it is instead written with a dot underneath in the Maghribi script. The Oxford Hebrew-English Dictionary transliterates the letter Qoph a transliteration as q or k, and, the English spellings of Biblical names containing this letter may represent it as c or k, e. g. Cain for Hebrew Qayin, or Kenan for Qenan. In modern Israeli Hebrew the letter is also called kuf, the letter represents /k/, i. e. no distinction is made between Qof and Kaph. However, many groups have made that distinction, with Qof being pronounced by Iraqi Jews and other Mizrahim
29.
Resh
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Resh is the twentieth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician Rēsh, Hebrew Rēsh ר, Aramaic Rēsh, Syriac Rēsh ܪ, and Arabic Rāʾ ر. Its sound value is one of a number of consonants, usually or. In most Semitic alphabets, the letter resh is quite similar to the letter dalet. In the Syriac alphabet, the letters became so similar that now they are distinguished by a dot, resh has a dot above the letter. In the Arabic alphabet, rāʼ has a tail than dāl. In the Aramaic and Hebrew square alphabet, resh is a single stroke while dalet is a right-angle of two strokes. The similarity led to the variant spellings of the name Nebuchadnezzar and Nebuchadrezzar, the Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek Rho, Etruscan, Latin R, and Cyrillic Р. The word resh is usually assumed to have come from a pictogram of a head, the words East Semitic cognate, rēš-, was one possible phonetic reading of the Sumerian cuneiform sign for head in Akkadian. The letter is named rāʾ/rāy/rays راء in Arabic and it is written in several ways depending on its position in the word, It ranges between an alveolar trill and an alveolar tap. The Unicode standard for Arabic scripts also lists a variant with a stroke, suggesting that this form is used in certain Northern and Western African languages. In Ashkenazi pronunciations, Sometimes a uvular trill or alveolar trill, among English speakers, sometimes an alveolar approximant as in English. In Sephardic and Mizrahi pronunciations, Either an alveolar trill or tap, Resh, along with Ayin, Aleph, Hei, and Het, is one of the letters that does not receive a dagesh by convention. In the Yemenite tradition, Resh is treated as most other consonants in that it can receive a dagesh hazak under certain circumstances, and in the most widely accepted version of the Hebrew Bible, there exist 17 cases where Resh is marked with a dagesh. Resh in gematria represents the number 200, Resh as an abbreviation can stand for Rabbi. Resh may be found after a name on a gravestone to indicate that they were a Rabbi or to indicate the other use of Rav. Resh is used in an Israeli phrase, after a child may say something false, one may say BShin Quf and these letters spell Sheqer, which is the Hebrew word for a lie. It would be akin to an English speaker saying Thats an L-I-E
30.
Shin (letter)
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Shin is the name of the twenty-first letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician Shin, Hebrew Shin ש, Aramaic Shin, Syriac Shin ܫ, and Arabic Shin ش. Its sound value is a sibilant, or. The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek Sigma, and the letter Sha in the Glagolitic and Cyrillic scripts, the South Arabian and Ethiopian letter Śawt is also cognate. The Phoenician šin letter expressed the continuants of two Proto-Semitic phonemes, and may have based on a pictogram of a tooth. The Encyclopaedia Judaica,1972, records that it represented a composite bow. The history of the letters expressing sibilants in the various Semitic alphabets is somewhat complicated, a letter variant س sīn takes the place of Samekh at 15th position. Šīn represents /ʃ/, and is the 13th letter of the modern alphabet order and is written thus, in the transcription into Spanish, the Greek letter chi was used which was later transcribed into Latin x. According to some sources, this is the origin of x used for the unknown in the equations, however, according to other sources, there is no historical evidence for this. In Modern Arabic mathematical notation, س sīn, i. e. šīn without its dots, in Aramaic, where the use of shin is well-determined, the orthography of sin was never fully resolved. To express an etymological /ś/, a number of dialects chose either sin or samek exclusively, for example, Regardless of how it is written, /ś/ in spoken Aramaic seems to have universally resolved to /s/. The Hebrew letter represents two different phonemes, a sibilant /s/, like English sour, and a /ʃ/, like English shoe, the two are distinguished by a dot above the left-hand side of the letter for /s/ and above the right-hand side for /ʃ/. In the biblical name Issachar only, the second letter is always written without any dot. This is because the second sin/shin is always silent, in gematria, Shin represents the number 300. Shin, as a prefix, bears the meaning as the relative pronouns that, which. In colloquial Hebrew, Kaph and Shin together have the meaning of when and this is a contraction of כּאשר, kaasher. Shin is also one of the seven letters which receive special crowns when written in a Sefer Torah, see Gimmel, Ayin, Teth, Nun, Zayin, and Tzadi. From this episode we get the English word shibboleth, Shin also stands for the word Shaddai, a name for God. Because of this, a forms the letter Shin with his hands as he recites the Priestly Blessing
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Taw
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Taw, tav, or taf is the twenty-second and last letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician Tāw, Hebrew Tav ת, Aramaic Taw, Syriac Taw ܬ, and Arabic Tāʼ ت. Its original sound value is /t/, the Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek tau, Latin T, and Cyrillic Т. Taw is believed to be derived from the Egyptian hieroglyph meaning mark The letter is named tāʼ , the plural form of Arabic letter ت is tāʼāt, a palindrome. Recently the isolated ت has been used online as an emoticon, an alternative form called tāʼ marbūṭah is used at the end of words to mark feminine gender for nouns and adjectives. It denotes the final sound /-a/ and, when in construct state, regular tāʼ, to distinguish it from tāʼ marbūṭah, is referred to as tāʼ maftūḥah. In words such as risālah رسالة, tāʼ marbūṭah is denoted as h, historically, it was pronounced as the /t/ sound in all positions, but in coda positions it eventually developed into a weakly aspirated /h/ sound, this /h/ itself was eventually left unpronounced. When a word ending with a tāʼ marbūṭah is suffixed with a case ending or any other suffix. For example, the word رسالة is pronounced as risāla in pausa but is pronounced risālatu in the nominative case, the pronunciation is /t/, just like a regular tāʼ , but the identity of the character remains a tāʼ marbūṭah. Note that the isolated and final forms of this letter combine the shape of hāʼ , when words containing the symbol are borrowed into other languages written in the Arabic alphabet, tāʼ marbūṭah usually becomes either a regular ه or a regular ت. Hebrew spelling, תָו The letter tav in modern Hebrew usually represents a voiceless alveolar plosive, the letter tav is one of the six letters which can receive a dagesh kal diacritic, besides bet, gimel, dalet, kaph and pe. Three of them – bet, kaph and pe – have their sound changed in modern Hebrew from the fricative to the plosive by adding a dagesh. In modern Hebrew, the other three – including tav – do not change their pronunciation with or without a dagesh, but have had alternate pronunciations at other times and places. In traditional Ashkenazi pronunciation, tav represents an /s/ without the dagesh, in some Sephardi areas, some Chassidic groups, as well as Yemen, tav without a dagesh represented a voiceless dental fricative /θ/, and tav with the dagesh is the plosive /t/. In traditional Italian pronunciation, tav without a dagesh is sometimes /s/, in gematria, tav represents the number 400, the largest single number that can be represented without using the sophit forms. In representing names from languages, a geresh or chupchik can also be placed after the tav. Tav is the last letter of the Hebrew word emet, which means truth, the midrash explains that emet is made up of the first, middle, and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Sheqer, on the hand, is made up of the 19th, 20th. 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
