From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
History
The letter
L is derived from the
Egyptian crook or
goad which stood for
/l/. This originally may have been based on an
Egyptian hieroglyph that was adapted by Semites for
alphabetic purposes. The Greek letter
Lambda Λ (upper case) or λ (lower case), as well as the equivalent
Etruscan and Latin letters, represent the same sound as the
Semitic letter.
| Egyptian hieroglyph |
Proto-Semitic Lamd |
Phoenician
lamedh |
Etruscan L |
Greek
Lambda |
|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
Pronunciation
In
English,
L can have several values, depending on whether it occurs before or after a vowel. The
alveolar lateral approximant (the sound which the
IPA uses the lowercase
[l] to represent) occurs before a vowel, as in
lip or
please, while the
velarized alveolar lateral approximant (IPA
[ɫ]) occurs in
bell and
milk (see
Dark L). This velarization does not occur in many European languages that use
L; it is also a factor making the pronunciation of
L difficult for users of languages that either lack, or have different values, for
L^, such as
Japanese or some southern dialects of
Chinese.
In English writing, L is often silent in such words as walk or could (its presence modifies other letters' sounds, i.e. 'wak' might be more likely to be pronounced such that it would rhyme with 'back').
Codes for computing
Alternative representations of L
In
Unicode the
capital L is codepoint U+004C and the
lowercase l is U+006C. In some fonts, a lowercase l may be difficult to distinguish from a 1 (one) or an uppercase letter I (
i). A more stylized version based on the handwritten ℓ is sometimes used - this is often used as a suffix on a number to represent
litres. Its codepoint is U+2113 and its numeric character reference is "
ℓ". Capital I (i) can also be hard to distinguish from a lowercase l (L), as many fonts use a vertical bar for both of these characters. In recent times, many new fonts have curved the lower-case form to the right and is increasingly common, especially on European road signs and advertisements.
The
ASCII code for capital L is 76 and for lowercase l is 108; or in
binary 01001100 and 01101100.
The
EBCDIC code for capital L is 211 and for lowercase l is 147.
See also
References
- ^ "L" Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989) Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged. (1993); "el", "ells", op. cit.
(Stokoe L)
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