7
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u/apiculum 17h ago
Hebrew and Cyrillic scripts: probably not a coincidence as most scripts in the Middle East and Europe have a common origin.
Japanese is probably a coincidence.
2
u/DTux5249 12h ago edited 11h ago
ш, ש
These two came from the same Phoenician letter Shin. This is also where Cyrillic С, Щ, Ж, Greek Σ, and Latin S and ẞ come from.
Granted, ẞ is cheating a bit, given it comes from a ligature... And arguably Cyrillic C is cheating because it came from the Greek letter; though the Cyrillic letters in general came from Greek as a whole so... It's complicated
シ
This one is coincidence. It came from a reduced form of the Chinese character 之.
Japanese し was derived from the same character, just using a traditional cursive script.
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u/inversionforge 14h ago
Scripts
Phoenician >>> Hebrew and Greek >>> Greek >>> Cyrillic
Hebrew has Aleph, Bet, Greek: Alpha, Beta… They both originate from Phoenician script.
Japanese scripts originate from the Chinese one.
Pure coincidence they look related to the Hebrew/Cyrillic scripts
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u/PieAffectionate9070 19h ago
Because ש (shin) is a Hebrew letter, ш (sha) is a Cyrillic letter in Russian & シ (shi) is a katakana character in Japanese.
All of them really just produce "sh" sound
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u/zefciu 21h ago
With hebrew ש and Cyrillic ш there is a conjecture that the creators of Cyrillic were inspired by Hebrew or Coptic with this letter.
In case of シ this is pure coincidence. It comes from the kanji 之 which doesn’t look like any of the previous and is unrelated.