Sawt, and a Sound Reconstructed as a Lateral

Sawt is the first of the two plain s letters of the fidel, and the consonant it wrote in the classical language is among the most argued-over in Semitic linguistics. Proto-Semitic is reconstructed with three separate sibilants where most of its daughters have fewer, and this letter carries the one conventionally transcribed with an acute accent, which several lines of evidence suggest was not a hissing sound at all but a lateral, made with the air escaping over the sides of the tongue.

The cognate sets run as follows. Hebrew has no separate sign for it and writes it with the shin, distinguished in pointed texts by a dot on the left rather than the right. Syriac merged it likewise. Arabic keeps it distinct as shin. Ge'ez keeps it distinct as this letter. So the alphabets that preserved the three-way distinction and the alphabets that collapsed it do not line up with each other, and any statement of which Ge'ez letter answers to which Hebrew one has to say which correspondence it means.

The atlas records the relation from sawt to the Hebrew shin as debated for that reason. The relation is real, but it is a relation to one of two values that the Hebrew letter carries, and stating it flatly would hide the argument rather than report it.