• T’S ANCESTOR IS found in ancient Semitic inscriptions from 1800 BCE as a sign looking like our simplest lower-case ‘t’, i.e. without an upward tail-flick on the bottom. By 1000 BCE, Phoenicians were calling this sign ‘taw’ meaning a ‘mark’ and it signified the ‘t’ sound. Placing a line across another to make an ‘x’ or a lower-case ‘t’ is one of the simplest ways we can show that ‘I was here’. A single line can be a scratch produced by mistake or by an animal. Cross the line with another line and it’s clear that something has been intended by someone.

The ancient Greeks adopted the Phoenicians’ ‘taw’ in around 800 BCE, calling it ‘tau’. The Greeks put the cross-stroke on the top like our upper-case ‘T’, perhaps to distinguish it from ‘X’, which in rough writing can slip round to the vertical. The Etruscans adopted ‘T’ in around 700 BCE and passed it on to the Romans a hundred years later. By this point the Romans called it ‘te’ (pronounced ‘tay’) and on their most fancy inscriptions in Imperial times it acquired its serifs and thin-thick lines.

t

Charlemagne’s scribes kept the ‘hat’ on ‘T’ but they started to curl the bottom of the downstroke in their ‘Carolingian minuscule’ script of the tenth century. The stroke across the downstroke doesn’t appear until around 1200 and Italian printers in the late fifteenth century adopted this form as their lower case. The ‘t’s were crossed.

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER-NAME

The Norman French arrived in Britain calling it ‘tay’ and by the process of the Great Vowel Shift this sound turned to ‘tee’.

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER

We make ‘t’ in our mouths in more or less the same way as we make ‘d’ but without using our vocal cords. Because it appears in ‘the’, ‘it’, ‘to’, ‘at’, ‘they’, ‘them’, ‘this’ and ‘that’, it’s in the top two words for frequency in English, only beaten by ‘e’.

Consonants that come after it at the beginning of words give us most commonly ‘tr’ (as in ‘tray’) and the two kinds of ‘th’ sounds as in ‘thorn’ and ‘this’ (see ‘D is for Disappeared Letters’ for how English used to manage this). The word ‘two’ indicates an old pronunciation you can revisit with ‘twice’, ‘twine’ and ‘twain’. The loan words ‘tsar’ and ‘tsetse’ give us a rare ‘ts’ start to a word.

At other places in words we can use consonants after the ‘t’ to make ‘hurtle’ and plurals like ‘bats’. Consonants in front of the ‘t’ can give us ‘start’ and ‘past’, the chocolate firm ‘Lindt’, ‘lift’, the ‘gh’ words like ‘right’ and ‘thought’, ‘empty’, ‘plenty’, a loan word like ‘diktat’, ‘silt’, ‘fact’, ‘apt’, ‘mint’, ‘next’ and ‘betwixt’ (a favourite of mine), and the artist’s name ‘Klimt’.

A ‘t’ on the end of some verbs gives us an alternative way to make the ‘simple past’ as in ‘dreamt’ and ‘learnt’.

‘Double t’ appears when we make ‘cut, cutting’ and we can get through a lot of Ts for ‘tut, tutting, tutted’ though the sound is sometimes written ‘tsk-tsk’.

We can end words with one ‘t’ or two, and make distinctions in meanings that way: ‘but’ and ‘butt’, ‘set’ and ‘sett’.

The diminutive ‘-let’ enables us to have ‘piglets’, ‘ringlets’ and the like, and if we retain the French form we have ‘omelettes’ while Americans have ‘omelets’. The ‘-tte’ ending also crops up in the old word ‘fytte’ meaning ‘a part of a story or poem’, in the name ‘Charlotte’ and in ‘St Mary-atte-Bow’.

A group of words play with the ‘t’ sound as in ‘tittletattle’, ‘tot’, ‘titter’, ‘tip-tap’, ‘totter’, ‘tatters’, ‘tiptoe and ‘itty-bitty’. We say ‘ta’ for thanks, and ‘ta-ta’ for goodbye, and the various forms of ‘tit’, ‘titty’, ‘teat’, ‘titty-bottle’. The song goes: ‘Tea for two’.