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Concept
Shin (letter)
Summary
Shin (also spelled Šin (DIN) or Sheen) is the twenty-first letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician šīn , Hebrew šīn ש, Aramaic šīn , Syriac šīn ܫ, and Arabic sin س. Its sound value is a voiceless sibilant, ʃ or s.
The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek Sigma () (which in turn gave Latin S and Cyrillic С), and the letter Sha in the Glagolitic and Cyrillic scripts (, ).
The South Arabian and Ethiopian letter Śawt is also cognate.
The Proto-Sinaitic glyph, according to William Albright, was based on a "tooth" and with the phonemic value š "corresponds etymologically (in part, at least) to original Semitic ṯ (th), which was pronounced s in South Canaanite".
The Phoenician šin letter expressed the continuants of two Proto-Semitic phonemes, and may have been based on a pictogram of a tooth (in modern Hebrew shen). The Encyclopaedia Judaica, 1972, records that it originally represented a composite bow.
The history of the letters expressing sibilants in the various Semitic alphabets is somewhat complicated, due to different mergers between Proto-Semitic phonemes. As usually reconstructed, there are seven Proto-Semitic coronal voiceless fricative phonemes that evolved into the various voiceless sibilants of its daughter languages, as follows:
In Aramaic, where the use of shin is well-determined, the orthography of sin was never fully resolved.
To express an etymological /ś/, a number of dialects chose either sin or samek exclusively, where other dialects switch freely between them (often 'leaning' more often towards one or the other). For example:
Regardless of how it is written, /ś/ in spoken Aramaic seems to have universally resolved to /s/.
Hebrew spelling: שִׁין
The Hebrew /s/ version according to the reconstruction shown above is descended from Proto-Semitic *ś, a phoneme thought to correspond to a voiceless alveolar lateral fricative /ɬ/, similar to Welsh Ll in "Llandudno".
See also Hebrew phonology, Śawt.
The Hebrew letter represents two different phonemes: a sibilant s, like English sour, and a ʃ, like English shoe.
Official source
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