The letter l - a cursory look

 Here's the only verse in Scripture that uses lamed (l), that great camel of a letter, 6 times.

לְמִ֨י א֥וֹי לְמִ֪י אֲב֡וֹי לְמִ֤י מִדְיָנִ֨ים ׀ לְמִ֥י שִׂ֗יחַ לְ֭מִי פְּצָעִ֣ים חִנָּ֑ם לְ֝מִ֗י חַכְלִל֥וּת עֵינָֽיִם		29 Whose is woe? whose is appetite? whose is dissension? whose is blather? whose are inflicted wounds for nothing? whose are flushed eyes?
c't lmi aoi lmi aboi lmi mdiinim lmi wik lmi pxyim kinm lmi kclilut yiniim	25 8

Proverbs 23:29

I'm sure you can find the answer. It's people who read lexica who inflict wounds on themselves for nothing. This return to the low tone of voice sums up the first four statements and underlines the approach to the cadence. Thank God for a rest in the middle of a verse. But what about the grammar: mi is itself a word signifying the question who. So lmi repeated 6 times is this verse is belonging to whom, or whose. Six verbless sentences. A plural noun on either side of the rest.

The prefixed l is another prefixed preposition with multiple glosses attached to it. In fact the article in BDB is too long for the chatgpt interface. The bot made up a little bit of nonsense when I asked it about lamed. So I have abandoned that approach in favor of a manual summary.

I found myself disappointed in the layout of the 7 different classes of usage that BDB lists. There is no end to layout options these days with our screen real-estate, but in BDB's day, paper was at a premium and the book promised to be very big, so almost all white space was eliminated in structural lists.

לְ prep. to, for, in regard to and used in many varied applications, in some of which the idea of direction predominates, in others that of reference.

1. very often, with various classes of verbs, to, towards, for ...

2. Expressing locality, at, near, idiom. 

3. To denote the object of a vb. —

4. Into ( εἰς ), of a transition into a new state or condition, or into a new character.

5. With reference to, 

6. Of time: towards, against, sometimes with collat. idea of in view of, for, during

7. With an infinitive. 

 I suspect that no one person actually sat down to write that section. It must have been contributed to by many grad students. Here's what I found. It's unreadable. My eyes are definitely tired and flushed after scanning this paragraph. There's no way one can learn easily from such a breakdown, however comprehensive it seems to be.