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The second symbol of the Amharic alphabet is called LÄWE and the pronunciation is like the letter L in English. The printed letter is similar to an upside down capital V with a very small line slanted to the left on its top, but the handwritten letter is closer to a printed lowercase h. It needs to be mentioned that the shape of the printed letters in Amharic not always match the handwritten form and that sometimes there is more than one way to write them by hand, this is just one way of drawing it. As in the previous letter, this letter is combined with the 7 different vowels of the Amharic alphabet to form 7 syllables and 7 different characters. The animations were made according to the instructions in the book Writing and Reading Amharic and the sounds are from the Amharic Online website. Phonetic symbols according to David Appleyard.

print	phonetics	how to write it and say it	examples
	lä as in learn		(läm) fertile - rich
	lu as in look		(lul) globe, pearl
	li as in leak		(lit’) dough(bread)
	la as in lap		(lam) cow
	le as in lend		(lela) other, different
	lï ï vowel as in evil. Only l at the end of a word		(lïjï) child, boy (lul) globe, pearl
	lo as in lot		(lole) servant

Finally all the sequence in alphabetical order :

I have to mention the matter of double consonants or geminate consonants, where the sound of the letter is prolonged. Sometimes you can have two words written in the same way with different meaning and you can distinguish them because one has a simple consonant and the other a double. For example:

alä  (he said)

allä (there is)

Another thing is about the sixth vowel "ï". Generally when this vowel is at the end of a word you don’t pronounce it, you only hear the sound of the consonant . For example:

you say lul (pearl) and no lulï . We hear only the last L at the end of the word.

But if a word ends in two consonants and the following word stars in a consonant, then you pronounce the "ï" in the first word.

I know, it’s a little complicated, more than I can explain in a post, that’s why I recommend one of the courses that I mentioned in the blog and that are listed in the page List. The purpose of these posts are to serve as a modest introduction to the language and the symbols to get people interested in learning Amharic.

Here is a quiz for the second letter of the alphabet:

Next week, the second letter H and I’m going to explain a little why there are more than one character for the same consonant.

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