Lawe, and the Long Drift of a Letter Name

Lawe writes a plain l and continues a Semitic consonant that has come down unchanged into every branch of the family. Its cognates are the Hebrew lamed, the Syriac lamadh and the Arabic lam, and in the Northwest Semitic order all three sit twelfth. In the halehame order this letter is second, which is a fair measure of how far the two sequences diverge.

The Hebrew name lamed is transparent inside Hebrew. It is the ox-goad, and the letter is named acrophonically, for a word beginning with its own sound. The Ge'ez name lawe is not transparent inside Ge'ez. It is close enough to the inherited name to be recognisable as a relative of it and far enough from it that the sense has gone. This is the ordinary condition of the Ge'ez letter names: a handful still show their Semitic word plainly, and the rest have worn down into forms that comparative philologists can line up with the Northwest Semitic set but that a reader of Ge'ez would not take for words.

The distinction matters for how these rows are recorded. A meaning can be given for a Hebrew letter because the tradition gives one. For most Ge'ez letters none is given, because none is attested, and supplying one by working backwards from the Hebrew would be a reconstruction presented as a fact.