Gimel: Difference between revisions

Gimmel redirects here, for the musical group, see Gimmel (music group).

Gimel is the third letter of many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew Template:Ivrit, Syriac ܓ and Arabic Template:ArabDIN 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 [ɡ]; in Arabic, it represents a voiced postalveolar affricate [ʤ] in the standard language, though this varies (with [ɡ] and [ʒ] being the most common) from dialect to dialect.

In its Proto-Canaanite form, the letter was likely named after a sling staff, (i.e. throwing stick-boomerang), ultimately deriving from a Proto-Sinaitic glyph based on the hieroglyph below:

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

Orthographic variants
Various Print Fonts			Cursive Hebrew	Rashi Script
Serif	Sans-serif	Monospaced
ג	ג	ג

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. In the Temani pronunciation, Gimel represents /ɡ/ or /ʒ/ when with a dagesh, and /ɣ/ without a dagesh. In modern Hebrew, the combination ג׳ (gimel followed by a geresh) is used in loanwords and foreign names to denote [[Voiced postalveolar affricate|[ʤ]].

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.

In the Syriac alphabet, the third letter is ܓ — Gomal in western pronunciation, Gamal in eastern pronunciation (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 [ɡ]. When Gomal/Gamal has a soft pronunciation (rûkkāḵâ) it is traditionally pronounced as a [ɣ]. The letter, renamed Jomal/Jamal, is written with a tilde/tie either below or within it to represent the borrowed phoneme [dʒ], which is used in Garshuni and some Neo-Aramaic languages.

The associated Arabic letter ﺝ is named جيم ǧīm or jīm, and is written is several ways depending in its position in the word:

The letter 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 IPA: [ʤ] as its standard pronunciation of the letter, but in Egyptian Arabic, the letter is pronounced as the voiced velar plosive /ɡ/ (as in Hebrew and the other Semitic languages), in Levantine Arabic as the voiced postalveolar fricative /ʒ/, in Kuwaiti Arabic a palatal approximant /j/, and still others (particularly among Bedouins) as a palatalized voiced velar plosive, /ɡʲ/, the most common reconstruction from Classical Arabic.

The Egyptians more often use the letter ﺝ to represent /g/ in foreign words, which may be confusing, since it may represent both [g] and [ʤ] (or [ʒ]). This way of transliteration has spread to other Arab countries for many words, e.g جلف (golf) (also spelled غولف in other Arab countries).

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 (Mashriqi) dialects. In addition, Egyptians are wont to pronounce ﺝ as /g/ in all situations, even when speaking MSA, and this carries over even into official communications such as news broadcasts and government bulletins.

• The Mystical Significance of the Hebrew Letters: Gimel