Shin (letter)

Shin (also spelled Šin (šīn) or Sheen) literally means "Sharp" ; It is the twenty-first letter in many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician 𐤔‎, Aramaic/Hebrew ש, and Arabic ش (in abjadi order, 13th in modern order). Its sound value is a voiceless sibilant, [ʃ] or [s].

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

The South Arabian and Ethiopian letter Śawt is also cognate.

Origins

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 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:

Hebrew Shin / Sin

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.

Sin and Shin Dot

The Hebrew letter represents two different phonemes: a sibilant /s/, like English sour, and a /ʃ/, like English shoe. 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/.

Unicode encoding

Significance

In gematria, Shin represents the number 300.

Shin, as a prefix, bears the same meaning as the relative pronouns "that", "which" and "who" in English. In colloquial Hebrew, Kaph and Shin together have the meaning of "when". This is a contraction of כּאשר, ka'asher (as, 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 12:6, 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 Star Trek.^[2]

The letter Shin is often inscribed on the case containing a mezuzah, a scroll of parchment with Biblical text written on it. The text contained in the mezuzah is the Shema Yisrael prayer, which calls the Israelites to love their God with all their heart, soul and strength. The mezuzah is situated upon all the doorframes in a home or establishment. 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 which 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.

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 šīn/sīn

In the Arabic alphabet, šīn is at the original (21st) position in Abjadi order. A letter variant sīn takes the place of Samekh at 15th position.

In Modern Standard Arabic, initial sīn-fatḥa (though, normally diacritics are omitted) (سَـ, pronounced /sa-/) is used as a prefix to imperfective verbs to indicate the future tense. Arab grammarians generally consider this prefix to be an abbreviation of سوف sawfa, meaning (in this sense) "will." Thus سَـ sa- prefixed to يكتب yaktub ("he writes") becomes سيكتب sayaktub ("he will write").

sīn represents /s/. It is the 12th letter of the modern alphabet order and is written thus:

šīn represents /ʃ/, and is the 13th letter of the modern alphabet order and is written thus:

Aramaic Shin/Sin

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^[3]:

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

References

Albright, W. F., "The Early Alphabetic Inscriptions from Sinai and their Decipherment," Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 110 (1948): 6-22.