This letter stood for/ʃ/ in Aramaic.𐢖 was not adopted into the Arabic alphabet because of the following considerations:
Proto-Semitic has threefricatives that becamesibilants in descendant languages:ś,š,s. In Arabicś gave/ʃ/, butš ands merged to/s/. In Old Aramaic all three sibilants were distinguished, ands was represented by𐢖 /ס /𐡎 while𐢝 /ש /𐡔 represented bothś andš. This orthography persisted in later Aramaic even to the time of theNabataeans, when the pronunciation ofś merged with that ofs/s/.
So when a scribe wanted to write the Arabic sound/ʃ/ fromś, he did so by using𐢝 /س purposefully in order to stick to a letter form that looks the same in the cognate Aramaic words (where it represented /s/). But when he wanted to write an Arabic sound/s/ from Proto-Semiticš, he would defy the Aramaic spelling for this Proto-Semitic phoneme (spelled in Aramaic asש /𐡔 and pronounced/ʃ/) were he to represent this Arabic phoneme by the sign𐢖 /ס /𐡎, whereas Arabic-Aramaic word pairs with the Proto-Semitics are – somewhat by coincidence – rare and there was hence only negligible pressure to employ𐢖 /ܣ /ס /𐡎, in total. So the impression was that𐢝 /ש /𐡔 /س is the most typical sign to write /s/ while the other possible sign fell out of use.
The fifteenthnumeralsymbol of the Arabicalphabet (traditionalabjad order, used for list numbering), written in theArabic script; preceded byن(n) and followed byع(ʕ).
Diem, Werner (1980), “Untersuchungen zur frühen Geschichte der arabischen Orthographie: II. Die Schreibung der Konsonanten”, inOrientalia (in German), volume49, number 1,→DOI, pages77–81
