Lamedh


Lamedh or Lamed is the twelfth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician Lāmed, Hebrew 'Lāmed ל, Aramaic Lāmadh, Syriac Lāmaḏ ܠ, and Arabic Lām ل. Its sound value is.
The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek Lambda, Latin L, and Cyrillic El.

Origin

The letter is usually considered to have originated from the representation of a goad, i.e. a cattle prod, or a shepherd's stick, i.e. a pastoral staff.

Hebrew Lamed

Hebrew spelling: לָמֶד

Pronunciation

Lamed transcribes as an alveolar lateral approximant.

Significance

Lamed in gematria 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. It is also used as the Electoral symbol for the Yisrael Beiteinu party.
As a prefix, it can have two purposes:
The letter is named lām, and is written in several ways depending on its position in the word:
Some examples on its uses in Modern Standard Arabic. :
Lām is used as a prefix in two different ways. Lām-kasra is essentially a preposition meaning "to" or "for", as in لِوالدي liwālidī, "for my father". In this usage, it has become concatenated with other words to form new constructions often treated as independent words: for instance, لِماذا limāḏā, meaning "why?", is derived from لـِ li and ماذا māḏā, meaning "what?" thus getting "for what?". A semantically equivalent construction is found in most Romance languages, e.g. French pourquoi, Spanish por qué, and Italian perché.
The other construction, lām-fatḥa is used as an emphatic particle in very formal Arabic and in certain fixed constructions, such as لَقد laqad and in the conditional structure لو...لَـ law...la, effectively one of the forms of if...then....

Character encodings