Sappa, and the Consonant Arabic Is Named For

Sappa wrote an emphatic sibilant of a kind that has left the family almost everywhere. It is reconstructed as a lateral, made with the air passing over the sides of the tongue and with the emphatic articulation on top, and it is the hardest of the reconstructed Semitic consonants to describe in ordinary terms.

Arabic keeps it and writes it with dad, and Arabic speakers call their language the language of the dad on the strength of it, because the sound was held to be peculiar to Arabic among the languages its speakers knew. Ge'ez kept it too, as this letter. Hebrew and Syriac merged it into their single emphatic sibilant before their alphabets were fixed, so those scripts have no sign for it at all and the relation recorded here from sappa to the Hebrew tzaddi is a relation to the letter that absorbed the sound rather than to an equivalent of it.

In the Ethiopian reading tradition sappa and saday are now sounded alike, so what this letter once represented is reconstructed rather than heard. It is a good illustration of how much of a classical language's sound is inference, and of why the atlas separates what a script's users do today from what comparative work reconstructs behind them.