Laula: The Coptic Letter (Value 30), from Greek Lambda

Laula is the twelfth letter of the Coptic alphabet and carries the numeral value thirty. Its shape is the Greek lambda, but Coptic did not keep the Greek name, and grammars record the letter as laula or in the Bohairic tradition as lavda. It writes the l sound, and in doing so it settles something the older Egyptian scripts left permanently unclear. Egyptian certainly had an l, but hieroglyphic and the cursive scripts derived from it had no sign reserved for it, using instead the signs that also wrote r, so that for most of the recorded history of the language it is not possible to say from the writing alone whether a given word contained an l or an r. Egyptologists work around this with transliteration conventions and with evidence from foreign transcriptions of Egyptian names, which is indirect and incomplete.

Coptic ends the problem. Once the Greek alphabet supplied a lambda and a rho as separate letters, words that had been indistinguishable on the page separated, and the Coptic form of a word became one of the standard pieces of evidence for reconstructing the consonants of its ancient ancestor. Laula is a small letter carrying a large methodological point: a change of script can preserve information that the previous script destroyed, and the gain is not only in vowels.