, for ). West Semitic loanwords in the "older stratum" of Armenian reflect as affricates , . Greek borrowing of Phoenician 𐤔 to represent /s/ (compare Greek Σ), and 𐤎 to represent (compare Greek Ξ) is difficult to explain if then had the value in Phoenician, but it is quite easy to explain if it actually had the value (even more so if had the value ). Similarly, Phoenician uses 𐤔 to represent sibilant fricatives in other languages rather than 𐤎 until the mid-3rd century BC, which has been taken by Friedrich/Röllig 1999 (pp. 27–28) as evidence of an affricate pronunciation in Phoenician until then. On the other hand, Egyptian starts using s in place of earlier to represent Canaanite s around 1000 BC. As a result, Kogan assumes a much earlier loss of affricates in Phoenician, and he assumes that the foreign sibilant fricatives in question had a sound closer to than . (A similar interpretation for at least Latin s has been proposed by various linguists based on evidence of similar pronunciations of written s in a number of early medieval Romance languages; a technical term for this "intermediate" sibilant is voiceless alveolar retracted sibilant.) However, it is likely that Canaanite was already dialectally split by that time and the northern, Early Phoenician dialect that the Greeks were in contact with could have preserved the affricate pronunciation until c. 800 BC at least, unlike the more southern Canaanite dialects that the Egyptians were in contact with, so that there is no contradiction. There is also a good deal of internal evidence in early Akkadian for affricate realizations of . Examples are that underlying |||| were realized as ss, which is more natural if the law was phonetically |||| → , and that shift to before , which is more naturally interpreted as deaffrication. Evidence for as also exists but is somewhat less clear. It has been suggested that it is cross-linguistically rare for languages with a single sibilant fricative to have as the sound and that is more likely. Similarly, the use of Phoenician 𐤔 , as the source of Greek Σ s, seems easiest to explain if the phoneme had the sound of at the time. The occurrence of for in a number of separate modern Semitic languages (such as Neo-Aramaic, Modern South Arabian, most Biblical Hebrew reading traditions) and Old Babylonian Akkadian is then suggested to