Lam with tah above

Lām with tah above (, ࣇ, 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]

Lām with small tah above
ࣇ
Usage
Writing systemArabic script
TypeAbjad
Language of originPunjabi, Kalasha-mun
Phonetic usage[ɭ]
[ɫ]
Unicode codepointU+08C7
History
Development
ل
  • ࣇ
Transliteration equivalentsळ
ਲ਼
ಳ
ળ
Other
Writing directionRight-to-Left
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
Extended Perso-Arabic script

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]

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.[3][4][5]

Forms
PositionIsolatedFinalMedialInitial
Image
Text ࣇ ـࣇ ـࣇـ ࣇـ


Character encoding
Character information
Previewࣇ
Unicode name ARABIC LETTER LAM WITH SMALL ARABIC LETTER TAH ABOVE
Encodingsdecimalhex
Unicode2247U+08C7
UTF-8224 163 135E0 A3 87
Numeric character referenceࣇࣇ

Font support

As of August 2022, these font families support U+08C7:

See also

References
  1. L.Trail, Ronald; R. Cooper, Gregory (1999). Kalasha Dictionary —with English and Urdu (PDF). Quaid-i-Azam University: National Institute of Pakistan Studies. pp. xiv. ISBN 9698023097. Finally, the to'e is also used to distinguish the Kalasha dark ḷ (ࣇ) from the light l (ل)
  2. "U+08C7 ARABIC LETTER LAM WITH SMALL ARABIC LETTER TAH ABOVE". Retrieved 2022-08-12.
  3. Evans, Lorna Priest; Malik, M. G. Abbas (2019-05-01). "Proposal to encode ARABIC LETTER LAM WITH SMALL ARABIC LETTER TAH ABOVE in the UCS" (PDF).
  4. Yar, Muhammad (1792). Afarinish Nama.
  5. Kaur, Gurmeet (2017). Fascinating Folktales of Punjab 1-5.
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