TSADE
Tsade
' is the eighteenth letter in many Semitic alphabets, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew and Arabic . 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 . In Aramaic, these emphatic consonants coalesced instead with Ayin and ', respectively, thus Hebrew ' ארץ is ' ארע in Aramaic.The above text is a snippet from Wikipedia: Tsade
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