Tit ࠈ

Tit is the ninth letter of the Samaritan alphabet and carries the numeral value nine, the last of the units before the sequence moves to the tens. The name is the inherited Northwest Semitic one behind Hebrew tet, and the letter stands for what was an emphatic t in the older language, a consonant made differently from the plain t written by taaf at the end of the alphabet.

The word emphatic is a term of art rather than a description. In Arabic, which preserves the series clearly, the emphatic consonants are pronounced with the back of the tongue raised and they colour the vowels around them. In the reconstructed earlier stages of the family they may have been produced differently again. What the alphabet records is that the distinction existed and was worth a letter of its own; how it sounded to the people who first wrote it is a separate question from how it is read now.

Greek, adapting the alphabet, had no emphatic consonants and no use for the distinction, so it fitted the sign to an aspirated t and called it theta. The Greek letter kept the ninth position and the numeral value nine, so a Samaritan scribe and a Greek scribe writing the number nine in letters are using the same inherited sign.

The character is encoded at U+0808.

Three of the twenty-two letters, tit, tsaadiy and quf, belong to a series that has no equivalent in English and that sets the Semitic languages apart from their neighbours. They are usually called emphatic, and they pair off against plain consonants: tit against taaf, tsaadiy against singaat, quf against kaaf. The alphabet treats each pair as two different letters, which is the strongest possible evidence that the distinction mattered to the people who fixed the signs.

What has happened to the series since varies by language and by reading tradition. Arabic keeps it, and keeps it audibly, with a characteristic effect on the vowels next to an emphatic consonant. In the reading traditions of Hebrew the series has been levelled to varying degrees, so the letters remain in the text and are written in full while the distinction they encode is no longer carried in the pronunciation. The Samaritan reading tradition has its own history here, independent of the Tiberian one, and it is one of the traditions linguists consult when they try to reconstruct what the series sounded like earlier.

The general lesson is the one this alphabet keeps teaching. The letters are conservative and the sounds are not. A script that has kept twenty-two signs unchanged for as long as this one has is preserving a phonological system its own readers no longer speak, which is exactly what makes it useful evidence and exactly why it cannot be read as a phonetic transcription.