Gimel
Gimel is the third letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician gīml ?, Hebrew gīmel, Aramaic gāmal ?, Syriac gāmal ܓ Arabic jīm. Ancient North Arabian ?, South Arabian ?, and Ge'ez ገ.
Its sound value in the original Phoenician and in all derived alphabets, except Arabic, is a voiced velar plosive ; in Modern Standard Arabic, it represents either a or for most Arabic speakers except in Northern Egypt, the southern parts of Yemen and some parts of Oman where it is pronounced as the voiced velar plosive.
In its Proto-Canaanite form, the letter may have been named after a weapon that was either a staff sling or a throwing stick, ultimately deriving from a Proto-Sinaitic glyph based on the hieroglyph below:
The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek gamma, the Latin C, G, Ɣ and Ȝ, and the Cyrillic Г, Ґ, and Ғ.
Arabic Jīm
The Arabic letter ج is named جيم '. It has four forms, and is written in several ways depending on its position in the word:
The similarity to ' Heth#Arabic ḥāʾ is likely a function of the original Syriac forms converging to a single symbol, requiring that one of them be distinguished as a dot; a similar process occurred to Zayin | and Resh |.
Pronunciation
In all varieties of Arabic, cognate words will have consistent differences in pronunciation of the letter. The standard pronunciation taught outside the Arabic speaking world is an affricate, which was the agreed-upon pronunciation by the end of the nineteenth century to recite the Qur'an, this sound also corresponds to ġ in Maltese as in ġar "neighbor" and Arabic جار jār "neighbor" both pronounced. It is pronounced as a fricative in most of Northern Africa and the Levant, and is the prestigious and most common pronunciation in Egypt, which is also found in Southern Arabian Peninsula. Differences in pronunciation occur because readers of Modern Standard Arabic pronounce words following their native dialects.Egyptians always use the letter to represent as well as in names and loanwords, such as جولف "golf". However, may be used in Egypt to transcribe ~ or if there is a need to distinguish them completely, then is used to represent, which is also a proposal for Mehri and Soqotri languages.
;The literary national standard pronunciations:
- : In most of the Arabian Peninsula, parts of Algeria, Iraq, parts of Egypt, parts of the Levant. This is also the commonly taught pronunciation outside the Arabic speaking countries when Literary Arabic is taught as a foreign language. It is the agreed-upon pronunciation to recite the Qur'an.
- : In the Levant, Southern Iraqi Arabic, most of the Maghreb, and parts of Algeria, and by some speakers in western Saudi Arabia.
- : In Egypt, coastal Yemen, southwestern and eastern Oman.
- : In Sudan, parts of Saudi Arabia, and hinterland Yemen.
- : attested among some bedouin dialects in Saudi Arabia.
- : In eastern Arabian Peninsula and Iraq but only colloquial speech, for example Kuwaiti Arabic وايد “a lot” vs. Najdi Arabic واجد.
Historical pronunciation
It is not well known when palatalization occurred or the probability of it being connected to the pronunciation of Qāf as a, but in most of the Arabian peninsula, the represents a and represents a, except in coastal Yemen and southern Oman where represents a and represents a, which shows a strong correlation between the palatalization of to and the pronunciation of the as a as shown in the table below:
Pronunciation across other languages
Note: In Kazakh is pronounced in some dialects, such as in the south and east. Hausa is pronounced, in the Hausa of Niger, is usually pronounced.Variant
A variant letter named che is used in Persian, with three dots below instead having just one dot below. However, it is not included on one of the 28 letters on the Arabic alphabet. It is thus written as:Hebrew gimel
Variations
Hebrew spelling: גִּימֶלBertrand Russell posits that the letter's form is a conventionalized image of a camel. The letter may be the shape of the walking animal's head, neck, and forelegs. Barry B. Powell, a specialist in the history of writing, states “It is hard to imagine how gimel = ‘camel’ can be derived from the picture of a camel ”. Solomon Gandz suggests instead that it is derived from "weapon" or "battle-axe".
Gimel is one of the six letters which can receive a dagesh qal. The two functions of dagesh are distinguished as either qal or hazaq. The six letters that can receive a dagesh qal are bet, gimel, daled, kaph, pe, and taf. Three of them 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. They are essentially pronounced in the fricative as ג gh غ, dh ذ and th ث. In the Temani pronunciation, gimel represents,, or when with a dagesh, and without a dagesh. In modern Hebrew, the combination is used in loanwords and foreign names to denote.
Significance
In gematria, gimel represents the number three.It is written like a vav with a yud as a "foot", and is traditionally believed to resemble a person in motion; symbolically, a rich man running after a poor man to give him charity. In the Hebrew alphabet gimel directly precedes dalet, which signifies a poor or lowly man, given its similarity to the Hebrew word dal.
Gimel is also one of the seven letters which receive special crowns when written in a Sefer Torah. See shin, ayin, teth, nun, zayin, and tsadi.
The letter gimel is the electoral symbol for the United Torah Judaism party, and the party is often nicknamed Gimmel.
In Modern Hebrew, the frequency of usage of gimel, out of all the letters, is 1.26%.