Tsade (also spelled or Tzadi or Sadhe or Tzaddik) is the eighteenth letter in many
Semitic abjads, including
Phoenician,
Aramaic,
Hebrew and
Arabic alphabet . Its oldest sound value is probably , although there is a variety of pronunciation in different modern Semitic languages and their dialects. It represents the coalescence of three
Proto-Semitic "
emphatic consonants" in
Canaanite.
Arabic, which kept the phonemes separate, introduced variants of and to express the three (see , ). In Aramaic, these emphatic consonants coalesced instead with and , respectively, thus Hebrew ארץ (earth) is ארעא in Aramaic.
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