Shin ش

Shin is the thirteenth letter of the modern Arabic order and the twenty-first of the older abjad order, from which it takes the numeral value three hundred. It is the sin skeleton, three teeth running into a shallow bowl, carrying three dots above. It joins on both sides and keeps only its teeth and dots at the beginning and in the middle of a word. Its sound is the voiceless postalveolar sibilant, the sh of English.

Shin is a sun letter, and it is the letter from which the whole category takes its name. The Arabic word for sun begins with shin; the definite article before it is written al- and pronounced ash-, with the lam assimilated and the shin doubled; and the fourteen letters that behave this way have been called the sun letters ever since. The complementary set are the moon letters, named from the word for moon, which begins with qaf and keeps its lam.

Unlike sin, shin has a secure inherited name. It descends from the Northwest Semitic shin, whose sense has been reconstructed as a tooth, and it holds the numeral value three hundred in Arabic exactly as Hebrew shin does. Where the sibilants of the Semitic alphabets are otherwise difficult to align, shin is the fixed point that both its name and its value agree on. Its three dots make it one of only three Arabic letters pointed with three, alongside tha and the Persian and Urdu additions built on the same principle.

Ordinary written Arabic records the consonants and the long vowels and leaves the short vowels unmarked. A newspaper, a novel and a legal contract are all printed this way. The marks that supply the short vowels, tashkil, exist and are perfectly standard, but outside of the Quran, of poetry, of books for children and of dictionaries they are simply not used.

This works because Arabic morphology is built on consonantal roots. A root of three consonants carries a field of meaning, and the patterns of vowels laid over it produce the particular words: an agent, a place, an abstract noun, a passive verb. A reader who knows the language recognises the root from the consonants and supplies the pattern from the syntax of the sentence. The script is not deficient; it is designed for a language in which the consonants carry most of the information.

It follows that reading aloud is an act of interpretation, and that is the point at which the written and the recited traditions of Islam meet. The consonantal skeleton of the Quranic text was fixed early and is stable. The vocalisation is transmitted orally, through named chains of reciters, and the canonical readings differ from one another in vowels, in some consonantal points, and occasionally in more. Those differences are not errors and are not treated as such. The written page underdetermines the recitation by design, the recitation is carried by memory and licence rather than by the page, and the discipline of the variant readings exists to record which vocalisations are transmitted and by whom.

Fully pointed Qurans, with both consonantal dots and vowel marks, are the norm today, and the marking of a printed edition states which reading it follows.