Lām Lamedh or Lamed is the twelfth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Hebrew Lāmed , Aramaic Lāmadh , Syriac Lāmaḏ ܠ, Arabic , and Phoenician Lāmed . Its sound value is . The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek Lambda (Λ), Latin ...

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

, , also known as "

Arabic Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C. E.Watson; Walte ...

letter

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

Shahmukhi alphabet Shahmukhi (, ) is a Perso-Arabic alphabet script used historically by Punjabi Muslims (primarily in present-day Pakistani Punjab) to write the Punjabi language. It is generally written in the Nastaʿlīq calligraphic hand, which is also used for ...

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 4,100 speakers of Kalasha. It is an endangered language and there is an o ...

. The

Gurmukhi Gurmukhī ( pa, ਗੁਰਮੁਖੀ, , Shahmukhi: ) is an abugida developed from the Laṇḍā scripts, standardized and used by the second Sikh guru, Guru Angad (1504–1552). It is used by Punjabi Sikhs to write the language, commonl ...

equivalent of the letter is

ਲ਼ Gurmukhī ( pa, ਗੁਰਮੁਖੀ, , Shahmukhi: ) is an abugida developed from the Laṇḍā scripts, standardized and used by the second Sikh guru, Guru Angad (1504–1552). It is used by Punjabi Sikhs to write the language, commonly re ...

. 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, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...

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: * PakTyp

* NoName Fixe

* Noto Urdu Nastalee

* Scherezade Ne

References

{{reflist Arabic letters Shahmukhi alphabet

History

Forms

Character encoding

Font support

See also

References