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El (Л л or Ʌ ʌ; italics: ''Л'' ''л'' or ''Ʌ'' ''ʌ'') is a letter of the
Cyrillic script The Cyrillic script ( ) is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic languages, Slavic, Turkic languages, Turkic, Mongolic languages, Mongolic, Uralic languages, Uralic, C ...
. El commonly represents the alveolar lateral approximant . In
Slavic languages The Slavic languages, also known as the Slavonic languages, are Indo-European languages spoken primarily by the Slavs, Slavic peoples and their descendants. They are thought to descend from a proto-language called Proto-Slavic language, Proto- ...
it may be either palatalized or slightly velarized; see below.


History

The Cyrillic letter El was derived from the Greek letter lambda (Λ λ). In the
Early Cyrillic alphabet The Early Cyrillic alphabet, also called classical Cyrillic or paleo-Cyrillic, is an alphabetic writing system that was developed in Medieval Bulgaria in the Preslav Literary School during the late 9th century. It is used to write the Chur ...
its name was (''ljudije''), meaning "people". In the Cyrillic numeral system, Л had a value of 30.


Forms

El has two forms: one form resembles Greek capital Lambda (Ʌ ʌ), and the other form resembles the Hebrew letter ת (Л л). In some
typeface A typeface (or font family) is a design of Letter (alphabet), letters, Numerical digit, numbers and other symbols, to be used in printing or for electronic display. Most typefaces include variations in size (e.g., 24 point), weight (e.g., light, ...
s the Cyrillic letter El has a grapheme which may be confused with the Cyrillic letter Pe (П п). Note that Pe has a straight left leg, without the hook. An alternative form of El (Ʌ ʌ) is more common in Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, and Serbian.


Usage

As used in the alphabets of various languages, El represents the following sounds: * alveolar lateral approximant , like the pronunciation of in "lip" * palatalized alveolar lateral approximant * velarized alveolar lateral approximant , like the pronunciation of in "bell" and "milk" * Labiovelar approximant , like the in "water" * voiced alveolar lateral fricative and its palatalized equivalent The phoneme in Slavic languages has two realizations: hard (, , or , exact pronunciation varies) and soft (pronounced as )see palatalization for details. Serbian and Macedonian orthographies use a separate letter  Љ for the soft it looks as a ligature of El with the soft sign (Ь). In these languages, denotes only hard . Pronunciation of hard  is sometimes given as , but it is always more velar than in French or German. Slavic languages except Serbian and Macedonian use another orthographic convention to distinguish between hard and soft , so can denote either variant depending on the subsequent letter. The pronunciations shown in the table are the primary ones for each language. In addition, л was formerly used in Chukchi to represent the voiceless alveolar lateral fricative but has since been replaced by ԓ.


Use in mathematics

El is sometimes used to represent the Clausen function, and if not, the capital greek letter Lambda is.


Related letters and other similar characters

*Λ λ : Greek letter Lambda *Љ љ : Cyrillic letter Lje *Ӆ ӆ : Cyrillic letter El with tail *Ԓ ԓ : Cyrillic letter El with hook *Ԯ ԯ : Cyrillic letter El with descender *L l : Latin letter L *Ł ł : Latin letter L with stroke *ת : Hebrew letter Taw


Computing codes


External links

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References

{{Cyrillic navbox Cyrillic letters