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. But when he wanted to write an Arabic sound /s/ from Proto-Semiticš, he would defy the Aramaic spelling for this Proto-Semitic phoneme 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 fifteenth letter in traditionalabjad order, which is used in place of numerals for list numbering (abjad numerals). It is 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
