Śawt ሠ is a letter of the

Geʽez script Geʽez ( ; , ) is a script used as an abugida (alphasyllabary) for several Afroasiatic languages, Afro-Asiatic and Nilo-Saharan languages, Nilo-Saharan languages of Ethiopia and Eritrea. It originated as an abjad (consonantal alphabet) and was ...

, descended from Epigraphic South Arabian , in Geʽez representing ś. It is reconstructed as descended from a

Proto-Semitic Proto-Semitic is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Semitic languages. There is no consensus regarding the location of the linguistic homeland for Proto-Semitic: scholars hypothesize that it may have originated in the Levant, the Sahara, ...

voiceless lateral fricative , like the Welsh pronunciation of the ll in llwyd. It survived only in South Semitic as an independent phoneme.

See also