?et
?ET
?ET (Heb. ??? ;?), the eighth letter of the Hebrew alphabet; its numerical value is therefore 8. It is pronounced as a fricative pharyngeal. The earliest representation of the ?et is in a pictograph of a fence ,. Variants of the latter form survived in the Phoenician , Hebrew , , and Samaritan . The Aramaic ?et dropped two of the horizontal bars and by the eighth century b.c.e. it had already become . This is the basic form of the modern Hebrew ? . The Arabic , developed through the Nabatean . In the Syriac and other eastern Aramaic scripts the ?et developed as follows: , . . From the GLYenician ?et the Greek "H" (the Ionian vowel eta) developed, but in Latin it regained its consonantal value (fricative laryngeal). See *Alphabet, Hebrew.
[Joseph Naveh]
