Shin (letter)

Shin (also spelled Sin or Sheen) is the twenty-first letter in many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew and Arabic (in abjadi order, 12th in modern order).

Its value is a voiceless sibilant, IPA or .

The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek Sigma (Σ), Latin S, and Cyrillic letters Es (С) and Sha (Ш), and may have inspired the form of the letter Sha in the Glagolitic alphabet.

Origins

The Proto-Sinaitic glyph, and possibly its Proto-Canaanite descendant glyph, according to William Albright and Brian Colless, may have been based on the hieroglyph for the uraeus, N6, in Semitic called shamash "sun" (also the meaning of the rune Sigel) with a phonetic value IPA .

The Phoenician 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 Encyclopedia Judaica, 1972, records that it originally represented a composite bow.

The history of the letters expressing sibilants in the various Semitic alphabets is a bit complicated, due to different mergers between Proto-Semitic phonemes. As usually reconstructed, there are five Proto-Semitic phonemes that evolved into various voiceless sibilants in daughter languages, as follows:

|| || || || ||

Arabic	Canaanite	Hebrew	Aramaic
س	שׁ	שׁ	ሠ
س	ס	ס	ሰ
ص	צ	צ	ጸ
ش	שׂ	שׂ	ሰ
ض	צ	ע	ፀ

Hebrew Shin / Sin

The Hebrew letter represents two different sounds: an alveolar sibilant, IPA like English s in "sing" and a palato-alveolar sibilant, IPA like English sh in "shoe". The two are distinguished by a dot above the left-hand side of the letter for and above the right-hand side for . The Hebrew version according to the reconstruction shown above is descended from Proto-Semitic , a phoneme thought to correspond to a voiceless alveolar lateral fricative , similar to Welsh Ll in "Llandudno".

Significance

In gematria, Shin represents the number 300.

Shin, as a prefix, has the meaning of the English words "that" (as in "A boy that reads", not "Pass me that book."), or "which"/"who". In colloquial Hebrew, Kaph and Shin together have the meaning of "when". This is a contraction of כּאשר, ka'asher (when).

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

According to Judges 12:8, the tribe of Ephraim could not differentiate between Shin and Sin; when the Gileadites were at war with the Ephraimites, they would ask suspected Ephraimites to say the word shibolet; an Ephraimite would say sibolet and thus be exposed. From this episode we get the English word Shibboleth.

In Judaism

Shin also stands for the word Shaddai, a name for God. Because of this, a kohen (priest) forms the letter Shin with 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 The Original Series.

In Jewish tradition the letter Shin is inscribed on the Mezuzah, a vessel which houses a scroll of parchment with Biblical text written on it. The mezuzuah is situated upon all the doorframes in a home or establishment. Sometimes the whole word Shaddai will be written.

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.

Sayings with Shin

The Shin-Bet was an old acronym for the Israeli Department of Internal General Security.

A Shin-Shin Clash is Israeli military parlance for a battle between two tank divisions (tank in Hebrew is shiryon).

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

Arabic

In Arabic, the same sound values as in Hebrew are needed, but the letters descending from are counted as two different letters, appears in twenty-first position in the common abjadi order, while is at the fifteenth position, replacing Samekh, which became obsolete due to the Arabic merger of Proto-Semitic and into .

Phoenician alphabet | Arabic letters