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 Šin (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. Prior to the advent and ascendancy of Tiberian orthography, the two were distinguished by a superscript samekh, i.e. ש vs. שס, which later developed into the dot. 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