In normal typefaces, the letter has a stroke approximately in the middle of the vertical stem, crossing it at an angle between 70° and 45°, never horizontally. In cursive handwriting and typefaces that imitate it, the capital letter has a horizontal stroke through the middle and looks very similar to the pound sign£. In the cursive lowercase letter, the stroke is also horizontal and placed on top of the letter instead of going through the middle of the stem, which would not be distinguishable from the letter t. The stroke is either straight or slightly wavy, depending on the style. Unlike ⟨l⟩, the letter ⟨ł⟩ is usually written without a noticeable loop at the top. Most publicly available multilingual cursive typefaces, including commercial ones, feature an incorrect glyph for ⟨ł⟩.[1]
A rare variant of the ł glyph is a cursive double-ł ligature, used in words such as Jagiełło, Radziwiłł or Ałłach (archaic: Allah), where the strokes at the top of the letters are joined into a single stroke.[1]
Polish Ł
In Polish, ⟨Ł⟩ is used to distinguish the historical dark (velarized) L [ɫ] from clear L [l]. The Polish ⟨Ł⟩ now sounds the same as the English ⟨W⟩, [w] as in water (except for older speakers in some eastern Polish dialects where it still sounds velarized). The name of this diacritic is called the kreska, which is shared with the five letters with acute accents.
In 1440, Jakub Parkoszowic[pl] proposed a letter resembling to represent clear L. For dark L he suggested "l" with a stroke running in the opposite direction to the modern version.[citation needed] The latter was introduced in 1514–1515 by Stanisław Zaborowski in his Orthographia seu modus recte scribendi et legendi Polonicum idioma quam utilissimus. L with stroke originally represented a velarized alveolar lateral approximant[ɫ],[2] a pronunciation that is preserved in the eastern part of Poland[3] and among the Polish minority in Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. This pronunciation is similar to Russian unpalatalised ⟨Л⟩ in native words and grammar forms.
In modern Polish, Ł is usually pronounced /w/ (as [w] in English wet).[4] This pronunciation first appeared among Polish lower classes in the 16th century. It was considered an uncultured accent by the upper classes (who pronounced ⟨Ł⟩ as /ɫ/) until the mid-20th century, when this distinction gradually began to fade.[citation needed]
The shift from [ɫ] to [w] in Polish has affected all instances of dark L, even word-initially or intervocalically, e.g. ładny ("pretty, nice") is pronounced [ˈwadnɨ], słowo ("word") is [ˈswɔvɔ], and ciało ("body") is [ˈtɕawɔ]. Ł often alternates with clear L, such as the plural forms of adjectives and verbs in the past tense that are associated with masculine personal nouns, e.g. mały → mali ([ˈmawɨ] → [ˈmali]). Alternation is also common in declension of nouns, e.g. from nominative to locative, tło → na tle ([twɔ] → [naˈtlɛ]).
Polish final Ł also often corresponds to Ukrainian word-final ⟨В⟩Ve (Cyrillic) and Belarusian⟨Ў⟩Short U (Cyrillic). Thus, "he gave" is "dał" in Polish, "дав" in Ukrainian, "даў" in Belarusian (all pronounced [daw]), but "дал" [daɫ] in Russian.
Examples
Notable figures
Marie Skłodowska Curie, a scientist awarded the Nobel prize in both physics and chemistry, who conducted pioneering research on radioactivity.
In contexts where Ł is not readily available as a glyph, basic L is used instead. Thus, the surname Małecki would be spelled Malecki in a foreign country.
In the 1980s, when some computers available in Poland lacked Polish diacritics, it was common practice to use a pound sterling sign (£) for Ł. This practice ceased as soon as DOS-based and Mac computers came with a code page for such characters.
Other languages
In Belarusian Łacinka (both in the 1929[5] and 1962[6][7] versions), ⟨Ł⟩ corresponds to Cyrillic ⟨Л⟩ (El), and is normally pronounced /ɫ/ (almost exactly as in English pull).
⟨Ł⟩ is used in orthographic transcription of Ahtna, an Athabaskan language spoken in Alaska; it represents a breathy lateral fricative.[10][11] It is also used in Tanacross, a related Athabaskan language.[12]
When transcribing Armenian into the Latin alphabet, ⟨Ł⟩ may be used to write the letter ⟨Ղ⟩/ʁ/, for example Ղուկաս => Łukas. In Classical Armenian, ⟨Ղ⟩ was pronounced as /ɫ/, which morphed into /ʁ/ in both standard varieties of modern Armenian. Other transcriptions of ⟨Ղ⟩ include ⟨Ṙ⟩, ⟨Ġ⟩ or ⟨Gh⟩.
In Venetian, a similar glyph ⟨Ƚ⟩, ⟨ƚ⟩ (L with bar, a horizontal bar) is used as substitution for L in many words in which the pronunciation of "L" has changed for some dialects, i.e. by becoming voiceless or becoming the sound of the shorter vowel corresponding to /ɰ/ or /ɛ/.
↑ Teslar, Joseph Andrew; Teslar, Jadwiga (1962). A New Polish Grammar (8th Edition, Reviseded.). Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd. pp.4–5. ł = English l hard, dental; ... It is true, of course, that the majority of Poles nowadays pronounce this sound with the lips, like the English w. But this is a careless pronunciation leading eventually to the disappearance of a sound typically Polish (and Russian also; it has already disappeared from the other Slavonic languages, Czech and Serbian) ... In articulating l, your tongue ... projects considerably beyond the horizontal line separating the gums from the teeth and touches the gums or the palate. To pronounce ł ... the tongue should be held flat and rigid in the bottom of the mouth with the tip just bent upwards sufficiently to touch the edge of the front upper teeth. (On no account should the tongue extend beyond the line separating the teeth from the gums.) Holding the tongue rigidly in this position, a speaker should then pronounce one of the vowels a, o or u, consciously dropping the tongue on each occasion, to obtain the hard ł quite distinct from the soft l.
↑ Swan, Oscar E. (1983). First Year Polish (2nd Edition, Revised and Expandeded.). Columbus: Slavica Publishers. p.xix. ł (so-called barrel l) is not pronounced like an l except in Eastern dialects and, increasingly infrequently, in stage pronunciation. It is most often pronounced like English w in way, how. "łeb, dała, był, piłka.
↑ Mazur, B. W. (1983). Colloquial Polish. London: Routledge. p.5. The sounds below exist in English but are pronounced or rendered differently: c ... h[, ] ch ... j ... ł as w in wet[, ] łach ład słowo[; ] r ... w
↑ Тарашкевіч, Б. (1991). Беларуская граматыка для школ. – Вільня (Выданьне пятае пераробленае і пашыранаеed.). Беларуская друкарня ім. Фр. Скарыны, 1929; Мн.: «Народная асвета».
↑ Станкевіч, Ян (1962). Які мае быць парадак літараў беларускае абэцады.
↑ Станкевіч, Ян (2002). Збор твораў у двух тамах. Vol.2. Энцыклапедыкс. ISBN985-6599-46-6.
↑ Campbell, George L. (1995). Concise Compendium of the World's Languages. London: Routledge. p.354.
↑ McKnight, Roberta (January 2001). "The Creek Way". ANT 3640 Language & Culture. Florida Gulf Coast University. Retrieved 21 May 2022.
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