Ta (Emphatic) ط

The emphatic ta is the sixteenth letter of the modern Arabic order and the ninth of the older abjad order, from which it takes the numeral value nine. It is written as a flat closed loop resting on the line with a single upright stroke rising from its left end, and it carries no dots. Adding one dot above it gives za.

It behaves unusually for an Arabic letter. Most letters lose part of their shape when they join, contracting to a tooth or shedding a descending bowl, but the emphatic ta keeps its loop and its upright stroke in every position, so it is one of the few letters a beginner can recognise anywhere in a word. It joins on both sides.

It is one of the four emphatic consonants, alongside sad, dad and za, and it is the emphatic counterpart of the plain ta that stands third in the modern order. The two are entirely separate letters rather than variants of one, and the difference between them is a difference of meaning in the language, not a matter of accent. It is a sun letter.

Its name descends from the Northwest Semitic teth, the cognate of Hebrew tet and Syriac teth, whose sense has been reconstructed as a serpent, and it holds the numeral value nine that Hebrew tet holds. It is one of the fourteen letters that stand disjoined at the head of a sura, where it opens several suras alone and in company with ha and with sin.

Arabic distinguishes four pairs of consonants that differ only in a secondary articulation called emphasis, or in the terminology of the recitation manuals, heaviness. Sin and sad, dal and dad, ta and its emphatic counterpart, dhal and za: in each pair the second member is made with the same primary closure as the first while the back of the tongue is drawn up and back toward the soft palate.

Two things follow, and both matter for reading the script. The first is that emphasis is not confined to the consonant. It spreads to the vowels beside it and often across the whole syllable or word, so that the a beside an emphatic sounds markedly darker than the a beside a plain consonant. A reader hears the emphatic before reaching it. The second is that Arabic writes these as four separate letters with no shared skeleton between the members of a pair, which is a different strategy from the one the script uses for tha and ta or for jim and ha, where a single shape is split by dots. The emphatics were inherited as distinct letters from the parent alphabet, so no repair was needed.

In tajwid, the discipline that governs Quranic recitation, the heavy letters are grouped and named, and the rules for when neighbouring sounds are darkened by them are set out in detail. That body of rules is transmitted orally, under licence from a teacher whose own chain of transmission is named, and it records distinctions the written page does not: which letters are heavy, when a normally light letter darkens, and how long a sound is held. The script fixes the consonants and the tradition fixes the voice.