Lamedh or lamed is the twelfth
letter of the
Semitic abjads
An abjad ( or abgad) is a writing system in which only consonants are represented, leaving the vowel sounds to be inferred by the reader. This contrasts with alphabets, which provide graphemes for both consonants and vowels. The term was introd ...
, including
Hebrew
Hebrew (; ''ʿÎbrit'') is a Northwest Semitic languages, Northwest Semitic language within the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family. A regional dialect of the Canaanite languages, it was natively spoken by the Israelites and ...
''lāmeḏ'' ,
Aramaic
Aramaic (; ) is a Northwest Semitic language that originated in the ancient region of Syria and quickly spread to Mesopotamia, the southern Levant, Sinai, southeastern Anatolia, and Eastern Arabia, where it has been continually written a ...
''lāmaḏ'' 𐡋,
Syriac ''lāmaḏ'' ܠ,
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 ...
''lām'' , and
Phoenician ''lāmd'' 𐤋. Its sound value is . It is also related to the
Ancient North Arabian
Languages and scripts in the 1st Century Arabia
Ancient North Arabian (ANA) is a collection of scripts and a language or family of languages under the North Arabian languages branch along with Old Arabic that were used in north and central Ara ...
𐪁,
South Arabian , and
Ge'ez .
The Phoenician letter gave rise to the
Greek
Greek may refer to:
Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe:
*Greeks, an ethnic group
*Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family
**Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor of all kno ...
Lambda
Lambda (; uppercase , lowercase ; , ''lám(b)da'') is the eleventh letter of the Greek alphabet, representing the voiced alveolar lateral approximant . In the system of Greek numerals, lambda has a value of 30. Lambda is derived from the Phoen ...
(Λ),
Latin
Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...
L, and
Cyrillic
The Cyrillic script ( ) is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking countries in Southeastern Europe, Ea ...
El (Л).
Origin
The letter is usually considered to have originated from the representation of an
ox-goad, i.e. a cattle prod, or a
shepherd's crook
A shepherd's crook is a long and sturdy stick with a hook at one end, often with the point flared outwards, used by a shepherd to manage and sometimes catch sheep. In addition, the crook may aid in defending against attack by predators. Wh ...
, i.e. a
pastoral staff. In
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, ...
a goad was called *''lamed''-.
Arabic lām
The letter is named لام .
Orthography
Its form depends on its position in the word:
Grammatical functions
has functions as a
grammatical particle
In grammar, the term ''particle'' ( abbreviated ) has a traditional meaning, as a part of speech that cannot be inflected, and a modern meaning, as a function word (functor) associated with another word or phrase in order to impart meaning. Alth ...
when used as a prefix:
* Prepositional ()
* of ownership ()
* of association ()
* of purpose ()
* of absolute negation ()
* Imperative ()
* of affirmative emphasis ()
(, ) is essentially a
preposition
Adpositions are a part of speech, class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in, under, towards, behind, ago'', etc.) or mark various thematic relations, semantic roles (''of, for''). The most common adpositions are prepositi ...
meaning 'to' or 'for', as in ', 'for my father'. In this usage, it has become concatenated with other words to form new constructions often treated as independent words: for instance, ', meaning 'why?', is derived from and ', meaning 'what?' thus getting 'for what?'. A semantically equivalent construction is found in most
Romance languages
The Romance languages, also known as the Latin or Neo-Latin languages, are the languages that are Language family, directly descended from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-E ...
, e.g.
French ,
Spanish , and
Italian (though is an archaism and not in current use).
The other construction, ( ) is used as an emphatic particle in very formal Arabic and in certain fixed constructions, such as (itself an emphatic particle for past-tense verbs) and in the
conditional structure , effectively one of the forms of 'if...then...'.
Hebrew lamed
Hebrew spelling:
Pronunciation
Lamed transcribes as an
alveolar lateral approximant
The voiced dental, alveolar, and postalveolar lateral approximants are a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents dental, alveolar, and postalveolar lateral ...
.
Significance
Lamed in
gematria
In numerology, gematria (; or , plural or ) is the practice of assigning a numerical value to a name, word, or phrase by reading it as a number, or sometimes by using an alphanumeric cipher. The letters of the alphabets involved have standar ...
represents the number 30.
With the letter
Vav it refers to the
Lamedvavniks, the 36 righteous people who save the world from destruction.
As an abbreviation, it can stand for litre. Also, a sign on a car with a Lamed on it means that the driver is a student of driving (the Lamed stands for ', learner). It is also used as the
Electoral symbol for the
Yisrael Beiteinu party.
As a prefix, it can have two purposes:
* It can be attached to verb roots, designating the infinitive (''Daber'' means "speak", ''Ledaber'' means to speak).
* It can also act as a preposition meaning "to" or "for".
Syriac lamadh
Character encodings
Variants:
*
References
External links
{{Northwest Semitic abjad
Phoenician alphabet
Arabic letters
Hebrew letters
Urdu letters