The Development of English The development of the letter ‘L’ Presented by:khalaily Lena

The Letter ‘L’ * The 'L' is a voiced alveolar lateral. * The 'L' ranks about 11th place among the letters in frequency of use in printed English. * The 'L' is frequently doubled, usually to mark a preceding short vowel (million, well).

Letter ‘L’ History Early 'L' comes from a later stage of the ancient Semitic alphabet, namely, the Phoenician alphabet of 1000 B.C. 

* The Phoenician letter had a crowbar shape and was called lamed, pronounced 'lah-med', meaning 'ox goad' . Lamed took the 'L' sound that began its name. It came 12th in the Phoenician alphabet, the same position 'L' holds today.    

When the Greeks copied the Phoenician letters around 800 B. C * When the Greeks copied the Phoenician letters around 800 B.C., they made lamed their own 'L' letter, at alphabetic place number 12. They called their letter at first labda, then lambda. * The Greeks reversed it, so it faced the opposite direction from the Phoenician version.

* Lambda with other Greek letters was carried in Greek trading ships to western Italy (700 B.C.), where the letter was quickly copied into the Etruscan 'L' letter, in turn was copied into the newborn Roman alphabet (600 B.C.).

*The Romans modified the letter's shape further and gave it to us as it is now.   *The small 'l' shape came very late to the alphabet: it was last to arrive. It became finalized in ink only in the 1400s. .

  * A silent 'L' before a consonant in words like 'should' and 'walk' was once pronounced in old English

Thanks for your attention Khalaily Lena