Yigal:
When the Greeks adopted the Hebrew/Phoenician alphabet, did a difference between sin and shin exist in Phoenician? There was no written difference.
The Greeks retained the samekh as a Xi "x" sound while they shifted the name
to the sigma, which was the sin/shin. The pre-exilic form of Hebrew samekh was almost
identical to the Greek uncial Xi and in the same place in the alphabet. The Greeks
dropped the tsada.
Faced with the four sibilants of Phoenecian, which they memorised without quite distinguishing correctly—especially when they didn't have half the sibilants in their own language—the Greeks jumbled the forms and the names of the letters, so that they no longer correspond to the Phoenecian originals.
It looks as if Aramaic originally had a difference between samekh and sin at
the time of Daniel, but by a century later, at the time of Ezra or Esther, it
either was in the process of or had completed dropping that difference.
Apparently Hebrew under the influence of Aramaic dropped the difference
within a few generations of Ezra. Hence Arabic which is even later did not
have the samekh.
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