Gimel

:"Gimmel redirects here, for the musical group, see Gimmel (music group).Gimel is the third letter of many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew Ivrit|ג, Syriac Unicode|ܓ and Arabic ArabDIN|ǧīm _ar. ﺟ (in abjadi order; 5th in higa'i order). Its sound value in the original Phoenician and in all derived alphabets save Arabic is a voiced velar plosive IPA| [ɡ] ; in Arabic, it represents a voiced postalveolar affricate IPA| [ʤ] in the standard language, though this varies (with IPA| [ɡ] and IPA| [ʒ] being the most common) from dialect to dialect.

The word is ultimately derived from Proto-Semitic "camel".

In its Proto-Canaanite form, the letter was likely named after a "throwing stick, boomerang," ultimately deriving from a Proto-Sinaitic glyph based on the hieroglyph below:T14

The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek gamma (Γ) and the Latin C and G and Cyrillic Г.

Hebrew Gimel

Variations

The letter gimel is one of the six letters which can receive a Dagesh Kal. The six are Bet, Gimel, Daled, Kaph, Pe, and Taf. Three of them (Bet, Kaph, and Pe) have their sound value changed in modern Hebrew from the fricative to the plosive by adding a dagesh. The other three represent the same pronunciation in modern Hebrew, but have had alternate pronunciations at other times and places. Gimel represents, in some Sephardi areas, IPA|/ɡ/ or IPA|/ʒ/ when with a dagesh, and IPA|/ɣ/ without a dagesh.

See Bet, Daled, Kaph, Pe, and Taf.

ignificance

In gematria, "gimel" represents the number three.

It is written like a "vav" with a "yud" as a "foot", and it resembles a person in motion; symbolically, a rich man running after a poor man to give him charity: "gimel" directly precedes "dalet" in the Hebrew alphabet, and this which signifies a poor/lowly man, from the Hebrew word "dal".

The word "gimel" is related to "gemul", which means justified repayment, or the giving of reward and punishment.

"Gimmel" is also one of the seven letters which receive a special crown (called a "tagin") when written in a Sefer Torah. See "shin", "ayin", "teth", "nun", "zayin", and "tsadi".

yriac Gomal/Gamal

In the Syriac alphabet, the third letter is _sy. ܓ — Gomal in western pronunciation, Gamal in eastern pronunciation ( _sy. ܓܡܠ). It is one of six letters that represents two associated sounds (the others are Bet, Dalet, Kaph, Pe and Taw). When Gomal/Gamal has a hard pronunciation ("qûššāyâ") it is a [unicode|ɡ] . When Gomal/Gamal has a soft pronunciation ("unicode|rûkkāḵâ") it is traditionally pronounced as a [unicode|ɣ] . The letter, renamed "Jomal/Jamal", is written with a tilde/tie either below or within it to represent the borrowed phoneme [IPA|dʒ] , which is used in Garshuni and some Neo-Aramaic languages.

Arabic transl|sem|ǧīm

The associated Arabic letter is named "transl|sem|ǧīm", and is written is several ways depending in its position in the word:

The letter "transl|sem|ǧīm" is matched only by "qaf" among Arabic consonants in the number of pronunciations applied to it dialectically. As noted above, Modern Standard Arabic has the voiced postalveolar affricate IPA2|ʤ as its standard pronunciation of the letter, but in Egyptian Arabic, the letter is pronounced as the voiced velar plosive IPA|/ɡ/ (as in Hebrew and the other Semitic languages), in Levantine Arabic as the voiced postalveolar fricative IPA|/ʒ/, in Kuwaiti Arabic a palatal approximant IPA|/j/, and still others (particularly among Bedouins) as a palatalized voiced velar plosive, IPA|/ɡʲ/, the most common reconstruction from Classical Arabic.

Many Arabs pronounce ﺝ as /ʒ/ when speaking in MSA, considering this to be standard, rather than /ʤ/. This pronunciation is very common for many East Arabic dialects.

External links

* [http://www.inner.org/hebleter/gimmel.htm The Mystical Significance of the Hebrew Letters: Gimel]