T

T is a letter of the Latin (Roman) alphabet, the script now used to write English and most languages of western Europe and, today, much of the world. It represents the stop /t/. Historically it is from Phoenician taw ('mark') by way of Greek tau. Unlike the Hebrew and Greek alphabets, the Latin (Roman) alphabet never developed a systematic per-letter mystical or numerological tradition: Roman numerals form a separate, non-alphabetic system, so this entry stays with the letter's linguistic and historical record. The Roman alphabet is the youngest of the three historical scripts covered in this atlas: Latium adapted it around the 7th century BCE from a west Greek alphabet, reaching it through Etruscan intermediaries who had themselves taken their letters from Greek colonists settled in the bay of Naples. Latin calls each letter simply by its sound rather than by an inherited name, unlike Hebrew and Greek, and it never built an alphabetic numeral system of its own, so there is no ancient Latin counterpart to Hebrew gematria or Greek isopsephy; Roman numerals are a separate, non-alphabetic notation.

A modern practice called name numerology, drawn from a twentieth-century repeating 1-to-9 chart and commonly marketed as Pythagorean despite no documented link to Pythagoras, assigns the letter T the digit 2; a rival popular scheme, the so-called Chaldean system, assigns different digits to the same letters, so even the two modern schemes disagree with each other.

The Latin T's descent, from Phoenician taw through Greek tau, is discussed elsewhere in this atlas. Taw is the last letter of the Phoenician and Hebrew alphabets and was originally drawn as a simple cross or X mark, literally meaning a mark or a signature; by the time Greek borrowed it as tau, the crossing point had shifted to the top of the vertical stroke, producing the T shape already familiar from classical Greek inscriptions.

Etruscan and Roman scribes carried tau's shape into Latin essentially without change, and the Roman capital T, one of the plainer and more geometrically stable letterforms in the alphabet, has remained a simple crossed vertical since antiquity. The lowercase t, formed through medieval cursive handwriting, extended the vertical stroke slightly below the crossbar and curved its foot, a modest departure from the capital that nonetheless makes t one of the few lowercase Latin letters with a short descender rather than a full ascender or a plain x-height body. T carries no Roman numeral value; the numeral system's tally of I, V, X, L, C, D and M skips directly past it, leaving taw's ancient meaning as a mark or signature only as an etymological curiosity, distinct from the living ritual weight the same letter carries as the last of the Hebrew alphabet, covered elsewhere in this atlas.