Teh with Ring

It marks Pashto’s t made with the tongue tip curled back. It contrasts with plain ت, so the two letters mark different sounds in Pashto spelling.

Arabic-script shaping can alter its visible form according to its position in a word; it remains the same letter.

Why was this letter made?

It was adapted for a sound Pashto needed to write. The ring-marked form adapts ت for a sound that the basic Arabic and Persian alphabets do not write with a separate letter.

The earliest surviving Pashto alphabet evidence discussed here is tied to Bayazid Ansari’s Khayr al-bayān, written in the mid-sixteenth century. Its introduction explains how to write Afghan sounds; later writers refined the alphabet. The same ring-marking approach appears in Pashto letters ډ, ړ and ڼ.