Taw ܬ

Taw is the twenty-second and last letter of the Syriac abjad, with the numeral value four hundred, the highest that any single letter carries. It writes t and is the last of the six letters with hard and soft readings; soft taw is the voiceless th of English think. It joins only to the right.

Its name is the inherited Northwest Semitic word for a mark or a cross, and the older linear sign behind that name was in fact a cross-shaped mark, which makes taw one of the few letters whose name still describes something recognisable about its distant ancestor.

Taw also serves as the feminine ending of Syriac nouns, which a small dot written beside it can mark, so the letter closes an enormous number of words in the language. Between that grammatical ending and its position as the last letter of the alphabet, taw is a letter of endings in two different senses.

Figures above four hundred are written by combining letters or by marking one to multiply its value, since the alphabet supplies nothing higher. That limit is a property of having twenty-two letters, and it is shared by Hebrew and by the Arabic abjad order, both of which run out at the same place for the same reason.

Taw is one of the eight letters that do not join to the letter after them, so a word containing it is broken into more than one connected run, and a word ending in taw closes with a shape that stands clear of whatever follows. Its two readings, the hard t and the soft th, are governed by the same rule that governs the other five letters of that set, and running text ordinarily leaves the points that would settle it unwritten.

The Syriac abjad has twenty-two letters and has had twenty-two letters throughout its documented history. It did not grow, and the things that look like growth are all of another kind: ligatures written by scribes, positional forms belonging to letters that already existed, marked signs made for Garshuni, and letters added by other languages that borrowed the script. Taw closes the list, and the list has stayed closed.

That is not the usual outcome. Alphabets in wide use ordinarily acquire letters, and neighbouring scripts in this atlas did: Arabic writes six letters beyond the inherited twenty-two, Mandaic added two ligature letters and later a borrowed one. Syriac chose extension by marking instead, again and again, over a very long period and across several languages.

One reason is what the script was for. Syriac is the language of a Bible and a liturgy, copied by communities for whom accurate transmission was the point, and a fixed alphabet is easier to transmit than a growing one. Another is that the additions were mostly made for other languages, by writers who had no standing to alter the Syriac alphabet and no wish to.

The result is that a Syriac letter can be described without qualifying which century is meant. Taw is the twenty-second letter, it carries four hundred, it takes a hard and a soft reading, and those statements are as true of the earliest inscriptions as of a liturgy printed this year.