Shin (letter)
Shin (also spelled Šin (') or Sheen) is the twenty-first letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician Shin , Hebrew Shin , Aramaic Shin , Syriac Shin ܫ, and Arabic Shin (in abjadi order, 13th in modern order). Its sound value is a voiceless sibilant, or . The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek Sigma () (which in turn gave Latin and Cyrillic С), and the letter "Sha" in the Glagolitic and Cyrillic scripts (, ). The South Arabian and Ethiopian letter "Śawt" is also cognate. Origins. 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 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: 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: Regardless of how it is written, /ś/ in spoken Aramaic seems to have universally resolved to /s/. Hebrew Shin / Sin. Hebrew spelling: 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". See also Hebrew phonology, Śawt. Sin and Shin dot. The Hebrew letter represents two different phonemes: a sibilant , like English sour, and a , like English shoe. The two are distinguished by a dot above the left-hand side of the letter for and above the right-hand side for . In the biblical name Issachar () 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. Significance. In gematria, Shin represents the  number 300. The breakdown of its namesake, Shin - Yodh - Nunh gives the geometrical meaningful number 360, which encompasses the fullness of the degrees of circles. Shin as a prefix commonly used in the Hebrew language carries similar meaning as specificity faring relative pronouns in English– "that (..)", "which (..)" and "who (..)". When used in this way, it is pronounced like 'sh' and 'eh'. In colloquial Hebrew, Kaph and Shin together have the meaning of "when". This is a contraction of , "ka'asher" (as, when). Shin is also one of the seven letters which receive special crowns (called "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 Samekh; 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 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 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 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. In Russian. The corresponding letter for the 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). Sayings with Shin. The Shin-Bet was an old acronym for the Israeli Department  of Internal General Security, and name of the service is still usually translated as such in English. In Israeli 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 ("armour" in Hebrew is שִׁרְיוֹן - "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, " is at the original (21st) position in Abjadi order. " represents , and is the 13th letter of the modern  alphabet order and is written thus: A letter variant "" takes the place of Samekh at 15th position. The Arabic letter "šīn" was an acronym for "something" ( "šayʾ(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". According to some sources, this is the origin of "x" used for the unknown in the equations. However, according to other sources, there is no historical evidence for this. In Modern Arabic mathematical notation, "sīn", i.e. "šīn" without its dots, often corresponds to Latin "x". In Moroccan Arabic , the letter , "šīn" with an additional three dots below, is used to transliterate the sound in foreign loan words. In Unicode, this is .