Lām Lamedh or lamed is the twelfth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Hebrew ''lāmeḏ'' , Aramaic ''lāmaḏ'' 𐡋, Syriac ''lāmaḏ'' ܠ, Arabic ''lām'' , and Phoenician ''lāmd'' 𐤋. Its sound value is . It is also related to the Anc ...

with tah above ( Lam Tah 640x960 isolated 2020-05-14 023125

, , also known as "

Arabic Arabic (, , or , ) is a Central Semitic languages, Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) assigns lang ...

letter

with small Tah above" or "arlām") is a character used in the

Shahmukhi alphabet Shahmukhi (, , , ) is the right-to-left script, right-to-left abjad-based script developed from the Persian alphabet, Perso-Arabic alphabet used for the Punjabi dialects and languages, Punjabi language varieties, predominantly in Punjab, Pakista ...

for the Punjabi language to represent a

voiced retroflex lateral approximant The voiced retroflex lateral approximant is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is l`. The retroflex lat ...

and is also used in the

Kalasha language Kalasha (, locally: ) is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by the Kalash people, in the Chitral District of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan. There are an estimated 7,466 speakers of Kalasha according to the 2023 Census of Pakistan. It i ...

. The

Gurmukhi Gurmukhī ( , Shahmukhi: ) is an abugida developed from the Laṇḍā scripts, standardized and used by the second Sikh guru, Guru Angad (1504–1552). Commonly regarded as a Sikh script, Gurmukhi is used in Punjab, India as the official scrip ...

equivalent of the letter is ਲ਼. This was added to Gurmukhi officially relatively recently, and is not universal, but does have a precedent for use in older Punjabi texts. It was added to

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

in 2020 (in version 13). Due to the recency of this addition, support is still limited among widely fonts. It is possible to approximate the letter using the character combination لؕ. The character is the sole member of the script group "Arabic letter for Punjabi."

History

The earliest source which attested a use of an arlam glyph identified in discussions of the proposed Unicode character was Muhammad Yar's 1792 ''Afarinish Nama''. Though present in some older works, most writing historically has not included a character for the Punjabi phoneme it represents, and there are other characters which writers have used to represent this sound in the absence of a standard for it. Gurmeet Kaur's 2017 'Fascinating Folktales of Punjab' was printed with a version of the lam glyph with a dot beneath, mirroring the differentiation present on lalle pair bindi in Gurmukhi.

Forms

Character encoding

Font support

As of August 2022, these font families support U+08C7: * PakType * NoName Fixed *

Noto Nastaliq Urdu Noto is a free font family comprising over 100 individual computer fonts, which are together designed to cover all the scripts encoded in the Unicode standard. , Noto covers around 1,000 languages and 162 writing systems. , Noto fonts cover al ...

Scheherazade New Scheherazade New, formerly Scheherazade, is a traditional Naskh styled font for Arabic script created by SIL, freely available under the Open Font License. It supports a wide range of Arabic-based writing system encoded in Unicode. The font off ...

References

{{reflist Arabic letters Shahmukhi alphabet

History

Forms

Character encoding

Font support

See also

References