| Lām with small tah above | |
|---|---|
| ؕل | |
| Usage | |
| Writing system | Arabic script |
| Type | Abjad |
| Language of origin | Punjabi, Kalasha-mun |
| Sound values | [ɭ] [ɫ] |
| In Unicode | U+08C7 |
| History | |
| Development |
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| Transliterations | ळ ਲ਼ ಳ ળ |
| Other | |
| Writing direction | Right-to-Left |
| This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters. | |
| Shahmukhi alphabet |
|---|
| ا ب پ ت ٹ ث ج چ ح خ د ڈ ذ ر ڑ ز ژ س ش ص ض ط ظ ع غ ف ق ک گ ل ࣇ م ن ݨ (ں) و ه (ھ) ء ی ے |
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Extended Perso-Arabic script |
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Lām with tah above (
, لؕ, also known as "Arabic letter Lām with small Tah above" or "arlām") is a character used in the Shahmukhi alphabet for the Punjabi language to represent a voiced retroflex lateral approximant and is also used in the Kalasha language.[1]
The Gurmukhi equivalent of the letter is ਲ਼. 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 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."[2]
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.[3][4][5]
| Position | Isolated | Final | Medial | Initial |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Image |
|
|
|
|
| Text | لؕ | ـلؕ | ـلؕـ | لؕـ |
| Preview | ࣇ | |
|---|---|---|
| Unicode name | ARABIC LETTER LAM WITH SMALL ARABIC LETTER TAH ABOVE | |
| Encodings | decimal | hex |
| Unicode | 2247 | U+08C7 |
| UTF-8 | 224 163 135 | E0 A3 87 |
| Numeric character reference | ࣇ |
ࣇ |
As of August 2022, these font families support U+08C7:
Finally, the to'e is also used to distinguish the Kalasha dark ḷ (لؕ) from the light l (ل)
