The barred lambda (Ƛ ƛ) (, ), is a modified letter of the

Greek alphabet The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BC. It was derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and is the earliest known alphabetic script to systematically write vowels as wel ...

, commonly encountered in North American linguistics. It is used by the Salishan and Wakashan languages in

Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its Provinces and territories of Canada, ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, making it the world's List of coun ...

. It is also used in

Americanist phonetic notation Americanist phonetic notation, also known as the North American Phonetic Alphabet (NAPA), the Americanist Phonetic Alphabet or the American Phonetic Alphabet (APA), is a system of phonetic notation originally developed by European and American ...

, where it is also known as running man,
(strictly speaking, this refers to the

glottalized Glottalization is the complete or partial closure of the glottis during the articulation of another sound. Glottalization of vowels and other sonorants is most often realized as creaky voice (partial closure). Glottalization of obstruent conso ...

version, ) to transcribe . In

physics Physics is the scientific study of matter, its Elementary particle, fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge whi ...

, it is used to represent the

angular wavelength In physics and mathematics, wavelength or spatial period of a wave or periodic function is the distance over which the wave's shape repeats. In other words, it is the distance between consecutive corresponding points of the same '' phase'' on ...

, i.e. the wavelength (''λ'') divided by 2 ( ''τ''), which corresponds to the length taken up by one

radian The radian, denoted by the symbol rad, is the unit of angle in the International System of Units (SI) and is the standard unit of angular measure used in many areas of mathematics. It is defined such that one radian is the angle subtended at ...

of the wave.

It was first used in a phonetics context in ''

American Anthropologist ''American Anthropologist'' is the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association The American Anthropological Association (AAA) is an American organization of scholars and practitioners in the field of anthropology. With 10,000 m ...

'' in 1934: It is also used for the affricate ͡ɬin transcribing the

Sahaptin language Sahaptin (), also called Ichishkiin (; Umatilla language, Umatilla: , Yakama dialect, Yakama: ), is one of the two-language Sahaptian languages, Sahaptian branch of the Plateau Penutian languages, Plateau Penutian family spoken in a section of t ...

, e.g., iƛúpna ‘he jumped’, and it is commonly used for the same purpose in several

languages of the Caucasus The Caucasian languages comprise a large and extremely varied array of languages spoken by more than ten million people in and around the Caucasus Mountains, which lie between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. Linguistic comparison allows t ...

. In addition, its counterpart with a combining comma above right (U+0315), , is used for many of the Salish languages, such as Klallam, for an ejective lateral affricate ͡ɬʼ

Encodings

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Lambda - barred Latin-script letters Phonetic transcription symbols