(sons of; Constructive State) instead of the usual bny; it is suspected that this infix represents the vowel ā. Long vowels ū and ī certainly seem to be indicated in forms such as the personal pronouns hmw (them), the verbal form ykwn (also written without the glide ykn; he will be), and in enclitic particles -mw, and -my probably used for emphasis. Diphthongs In the Old Sabaean inscriptions the Proto-Semitic diphthongs aw and ay seemed to have been retained, being written with the letters w and y; in the later stages the same words are increasingly found without these letters, which leads some scholars (such as Stein) to the conclusion that they had by then contracted to ō and ē (though aw → ū and ay → ī would also be possible) Consonants Sabaean, like Proto-Semitic, contains three sibilant phonemes, represented by distinct letters; the exact phonetic nature of these sounds is still uncertain. In the early days of Sabaean studies, Old South Arabian was transcribed using Hebrew letters. The transcriptions of the alveolars or postvelar fricatives remained controversial; after a great deal of uncertainty in the initial period the lead was taken by the transcription chosen by Nikolaus Rhodokanakis and others for the Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum (s, š, and ś), until A. F. L. Beeston proposed replacing this with the representation with s followed by the subscripts 1–3. This latest version has largely taken over the English-speaking world, while in the German-speaking area, for example, the older transcription signs, which are also given in the table below, are more widespread. They were transcribed by Beeston as s1, s2, and s3. Bearing in mind the latest reconstructions of the Proto-Semitic sibilants, we can postulate that s1 was probably pronounced as a simple [s]or [ʃ], s2 was probably a lateral fricative [ɬ], and s3 may have been realized as an affricate [t͡s]. The difference between the three sounds is maintained throughout Old Sabaean and Middle Sabaean, but in the Late period s1 and s3 merge. The subscript n did not start appearing until after the Early Sabaic period. The Middle Sabaean Haramitic dialect often shows the change s3 > s1, for example: ˀks1wt ("clothes"), normal Sabaean ks3wy. The exact nature of the emphatic consonants q, ṣ, ṭ, ẓ and ḑ also remains a matter for debate: were they pharyngealized as in Modern Arabic, or were they glottalized as in Ethiopic (and