DALET

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'Dalet' (, also spelled 'Daleth' or 'Daled') is the fourth letter of many Semitic alphabets, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew , Syriac and Arabic (in abjadi order; 8th in modern order). Its sound value is a voiced alveolar plosive ().
The letter is based on a glyph of the Middle Bronze Age alphabets, probably called ''dalt'' "door" (''door'' in Modern Hebrew is 'delet'), ultimately based on a hieroglyph depicting a door, O31
The Proto-Canaanite letter may have been called ''digg'' "fish" (Hebrew ''dag'').
The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek delta (Δ), Latin D and the equivalent in the Cyrillic Д.

Contents

Arabic dāl

Hebrew Dalet

Variations

Significance

Syriac Dolath/Dalat

See also

Arabic dāl

The letter is named ''dāl'', and is written is several ways depending in its position in the word:

Hebrew Dalet

The letter is ''dalet'' in the modern Israeli Hebrew pronunciation (see Taw (letter)|Tav (letter)). ''Dales'' is still used by many Ashkenazi Jews and ''daleth'' by some Jews of Middle-Eastern background, especially in the diaspora. In some academic circles, it is called ''daleth'', following the Tiberian Hebrew pronunciation. It is also called ''daled''. The 'ד' like the English D represents a voiced alveolar plosive. Just as in English, there may be subtle varieties of the sound that are created when it is spoken. Daleth and Resh have nearly the same appearance, and were/are often mistaken for one another.

Variations

Dalet can receive a dagesh, being one of the 6 letters that can receive Dagesh Kal (see Gimel).
There are minor variations to this letter's pronunciation, such as:

★ 'ד' dhalet ( among Teimanim, Mizrachim and some Sephardim; among some Ashkenazim.)
or:

★ 'דּ' dalet
In addition, in modern Hebrew, the letter can also be written with an apostrophe in front of it (known as a chupchik): 'ד which alters the pronunciation to /ð/.

Significance

In gematria, dalet symbolizes the number four.
The letter dalet, along with the He (and very rarely Gimel) is used to represent the Names of God in Judaism. The letter He is used commonly, and the dalet is rarer. A good example is the keter (crown) of a tallit, which has the blessing for donning the tallit, and has the name of God usually represented by a dalet.
Dalet as a prefix in Aramaic (the language of the Talmud) is a preposition meaning "that", or "which", or also "from" or "of"; since many Talmudic terms have found their way into Hebrew, one can hear dalet as a prefix in many phrases (as in ''Mitzvah 'D'oraitah''; a mitzvah from the Torah.)

Syriac Dolath/Dalat

In the Syriac alphabet, the fourth letter is ܕ — Dolath in western pronunciation, Dalat in eastern pronunciation (ܕܠܬ). It is one of six letters that represents two associated sounds (the others are Bet, Gimel, Kaph, Pe and Taw). When Dolath/Dalat has a hard pronunciation (''qûššāyâ'') it is a [d]. When Dolath/Dalat has a soft pronunciation ('') it is traditionally pronounced as a []. The letter is very common in Syriac as it is often attached to the beginning of words as the relative pronoun.
Dolath/Dalat is always written with a point below it to distinguish it from the letter Resh (ܪ), which is identical apart from having a point above. As a numeral, Dolath/Dalat stands for the number four. With various systems of dots and dashes, it can also stand for 4,000 and 40,000.

See also

★ Star of David (two Phoenician Dalet letters)