Shin (letter)

Shin (also spelled Šin (šīn) or Sheen) is the twenty-first and penultimate letter of the Semitic abjads, including Arabic sīn س‎^[a][b][c], Aramaic šīn 𐡔, Hebrew šīn ש‎, Phoenician šīn 𐤔 and Syriac šīn ܫ.

The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek Sigma (Σ) (which in turn gave Latin S and the German letter ẞ and Cyrillic С), and the letter Sha in the Glagolitic and Cyrillic scripts (, Ш).

The South Arabian and Ethiopian letter Śawt is also cognate. The letter šīn is the only letter of the Arabic alphabet with three dots with a letter corresponding to a letter in the Northwest Semitic abjad or the Phoenician alphabet.

Egyptian hieroglyph	Proto-Sinaitic	Phoenician	Paleo-Hebrew

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".^[4] However, the Proto-Semitic word for "tooth" has been reconstructed as *šinn-.^[5]

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:

Based on Semitic linguists (hypothesized), Samekh has no surviving descendant in the Arabic alphabet, and that sīn is derived from Phoenician šīn 𐤔 rather than Phonecian sāmek 𐤎, but it corresponds exclusively to Arabic س Sīn when comparing etymologically to other Semitic languages. In the Mashriqi abjadi order س sīn takes the place of Samekh at 15th position;^[d] meanwhile, the letter variant shīn is placed at the original (21st) position, represents /ʃ/, and is the 13th letter of the modern hijā’ī (هِجَائِي) or alifbāʾī (أَلِفْبَائِي) order and is written thus:

In the Arabic alphabet, according to McDonald (1986), "there can be no doubt that ش‎‎ is a formal derivative of س and that س is descended from 𐡔."^[3]

In the Maghrebian abjadi order sīn is at the 21st position, represents /s/,

The Arabic letter shīn was an acronym for "something" (شيء shayʾ(un) [ʃajʔ(un)]) meaning the unknown in algebraic equations. In the transcription into Spanish, the Greek letter chi (χ) was used which was later transcribed into Latin x. The letter shīn, along with Ṯāʾ, are the only two surviving letters in Arabic with three dots above. According to some sources, this is the origin of x used for the unknown in the equations.^[6][7] However, according to other sources, there is no historical evidence for this.^[8][9] In Modern Arabic mathematical notation, س sīn, i.e. shīn without its dots, often corresponds to Latin x. This led a debate to many Semitic linguists that the letter shīn is Arabic for samekh, although many Semitic linguists argue this debate as samekh has no surviving descendant in the Arabic alphabet.

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:^[10]

Regardless of how it is written, *ś in spoken Aramaic seems to have universally resolved to /s/.

Orthographic variants
Various print fonts			Cursive Hebrew	Rashi script
Serif	Sans-serif	Monospaced
ש	ש	ש

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" (Welsh: [ɬanˈdɨdnɔ] ^ⓘ).

See also Hebrew phonology, Śawt.

The Hebrew letter represents two different phonemes: a sibilant /s/, like English sour, and a /ʃ/, like English shoe. Prior to the advent and ascendancy of Tiberian orthography, the two were distinguished by a superscript samekh, i.e. ש‎ vs. ש^ס‎, which later developed into the dot. The two are distinguished by a dot above the left-hand side of the letter for /s/ and above the right-hand side for /ʃ/. In the biblical name Issachar (Hebrew: יִשָּׂשכָר) only, the second sin/shin letter is always written without any dot, even in fully vocalized texts. This is because the second sin/shin is always silent.

In gematria, Shin represents the number 300. The breakdown of its namesake, Shin[300] - Yodh[10] - Nunh[50] gives the geometrical meaningful number 360, which can be interpreted as encompassing the fullness of the degrees of circles.

Shin as a prefix commonly used in late-Biblical and Modern Hebrew language carries similar meaning as specificity faring relative pronouns in English: "that (..)", "which (..)" and "who (..)". When used this way, it is pronounced as 'sheh-' (IPA /ʃɛ-/. In colloquial Hebrew, Kaph and Shin together are a contraction of כּאשר, ka'asher (as, when).

Shin is also one of the seven letters which receive “crowns” (called tagin) in a Sefer Torah. (See Gimmel, Ayin, Teth, Nun, Zayin, and Tzadi).

According to Judges 12:6, the tribe of Ephraim could not differentiate between Shin and Samekh; when the Gileadites were at war with the Ephraimites, they would ask suspected Ephraimites to say the word shibboleth; an Ephraimite would say sibboleth and thus be exposed. This episode is the origin of the English term shibboleth.

Shin also stands for the word Shaddai, a Name of God. A kohen forms the letter Shin with each of his hands as he recites the Priestly Blessing. In the mid-1960s, actor Leonard Nimoy used a single-handed version of this gesture to create the Vulcan hand salute for his character, Mr. Spock, on Star Trek.^[13][14]

The letter Shin is often written on the case of a mezuzah, a scroll of parchment containing select Biblical texts. Sometimes the whole word Shaddai will be written.

The Shema Yisrael prayer also commands the Israelites to write God's commandments on their hearts (Deut. 6:6); the shape of the letter Shin mimics the structure of the human heart: the lower, larger left ventricle (which supplies the full body) and the smaller right ventricle (which supplies the lungs) are positioned like the lines of the letter Shin.

A religious significance has been applied to the fact that there are three valleys that comprise the city of Jerusalem's geography: the Valley of Ben Hinnom, Tyropoeon Valley, and Kidron Valley, and that these valleys converge to also form the shape of the letter shin, and that the Temple in Jerusalem is located where the dagesh (horizontal line) is. This is seen as a fulfillment of passages such as Deuteronomy 16:2 that instructs Jews to celebrate the Pasach at "the place the LORD will choose as a dwelling for his Name" (NIV).

In the Sefer Yetzirah the letter Shin is King over Fire, Formed Heaven in the Universe, Hot in the Year, and the Head in the Soul.

The 13th-century Kabbalistic text Sefer HaTemunah, holds that a single letter of unknown pronunciation, held by some to be the four-pronged shin on one side of the teffilin box, is missing from the current alphabet. The world's flaws, the book teaches, are related to the absence of this letter, the eventual revelation of which will repair the universe.

The corresponding letter for the /ʃ/ sound in Russian is nearly identical in shape to the Hebrew shin. Given that the Cyrillic script includes borrowed letters from a variety of different alphabets such as Greek and Latin, it is often suggested that the letter sha is directly borrowed from the Hebrew letter shin (other hypothesized sources include Coptic and Samaritan).

Shin Bet is a commonly used acronym for the Israeli Department of Internal General Security. Despite referring to a former name of the department, it remains the term usually used in English. In Modern Hebrew and Palestinian Arabic, the security service is known as the Shabak.

A Shin-Shin clash is Israeli military parlance for a battle between two tank divisions (from Hebrew: שִׁרְיוֹן, romanized: shiryon, lit. 'armour').

Sh'at haShin ('Shin hour') is the last possible moment for any action, usually in a military context. Corresponds to the English expression eleventh hour.

• Macdonald, Michael C. A. (1986). "ABCs and letter order in Ancient North Arabian". Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies (16): 101–168.
• Kogan, Leonid (2011). "Proto-Semitic Phonology and Phonetics". In Weninger, Stefan (ed.). The Semitic Languages: An International Handbook. Walter de Gruyter. pp. 54–151. ISBN 978-3-11-025158-6.

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