|
Ll/ll is a digraph which occurs in several natural languages.
Spanish, Galician, and Catalan In Spanish, official Galician spelling and Catalan, the Ll combination stands for the sound (a palatal ). Most Spanish speakers pronounce Ll as 'y' (yeísmo). As a result, in most parts of Latin America as well as in many regions of Spain, Spanish speakers pronounce it while some other Latin Americans (especially Rioplatense speakers) pronounce it . It was considered a single letter in Spanish orthography, and was collated after 'l' as a separate entry, but this is no longer done. However, it is considered so for acronyms. Hypercorrection leads some to wrongly capitalize it as a single letter ("LLosa" instead of the official "Llosa") as with the Dutch IJ. In handwriting it is written as a ligature of two L's, with a distinct uppercase and lowercase form. An old ligature for Ll is known as the 'broken l', which takes the form of a lowercase 'l' with the top half shifted to the left, connected to the lower half with a thin horizontal stroke. This ligature is not encoded by any standard character encoding and therefore cannot be used in digitized documents. Albanian In Albanian, L stands, as in Spanish, for the sound , while Ll is pronounced as the velar sound . Welsh In Welsh, Ll stands for a voiceless lateral fricative sound, found also in Navajo, where it is written as ł. The IPA signifies this sound as l with belt (). This sound is very common in place names in Wales because it occurs in the word Llan, meaning "church to saint "..." e.g. Llanelli where it appears twice, or "Llanrwst", which means, "church to saint Gwrwst " These Welsh placenames are therefore very often mispronounced by English speakers, especially those from outside the British Isles, but also most Britons. | ||||||||
|
| |||||||||
 |
|
| |