Ghe with upturn (Ґ ґ; italics: Ґ ґ ) is a letter of the Cyrillic script. It is used in Ukrainian, Rusyn and also in some variants of Urum and Belarusian (i.e. Taraškievica) alphabets. In these alphabets it's usually called "Ge", while the other letter — ‹Г г› (which in its turn is also called "Ge" in Russian and some other languages) — is called "He". In Unicode this letter is called "Ghe with upturn".
Contents
The letterform of this letter is based on the letterform of the letter ‹Г г›, but its handwritten and italic lowercase forms do not follow the italic modification of ‹Г г› (i.e. г).
It represents the voiced velar plosive /ɡ/, like the pronunciation of ‹g› in "go".
Ghe with upturn is romanized using the Latin letter G (but with an additional grave accent in ISO 9).
History
The common Slavic voiced velar plosive [ɡ] is represented in most Cyrillic orthographies by ‹Г›, called ге ghe in most languages. In Ukrainian, however, around the early 13th century, the sound lenited to the voiced velar fricative [ɣ] (except in the cluster *zg), and around the 16th century, debuccalized to the voiced glottal fricative [ɦ] (like the pronunciation of ‹h› in behind). The phoneme continued to be represented by ‹Г›, called ге he in Ukrainian.
Within a century after this sound change began, [ɡ] was re-introduced from Western European loanwords. Since then, it has been represented by several different notations in writing.
In early Belarusian and Ukrainian orthographies, Latin ‹g› or the Cyrillic digraph ‹кг› (kh) were sometimes used for the sound of Latin ‹g› in assimilated words. The first text to consequently employ the letter ‹ґ› was the 16th-century Peresopnytsia Gospel. The use of the letter was not confined to the Old- and Middle-Ukrainian-speaking territory, and there was a fully-fledged use in the 16th-century printer Pyotr Mstislavets's edition of The Four Gospels. Later, distinguishing of the sound and using the digraph gradually disappeared from Belarusian orthography.
As far as linguistic studies are concerned, the letter ‹ґ› was first introduced into the Slavic alphabet in 1619 by Meletius Smotrytsky in his "Slavic Grammar" (Грамматіки славєнскиѧ правилноє Сѵнтаґма). Later, for an identical purpose, it was saved in the new orthography of Ukrainian.
The letter ‹ґ› was officially eliminated from the Ukrainian alphabet in the Soviet orthographic reforms of 1933, its function being subsumed into that of the letter ‹г›, pronounced in Ukrainian as [ɦ]. However, ‹ґ› continued to be used by Ukrainians in Galicia (part of Poland until 1939) and in the Ukrainian diaspora worldwide. It was reintroduced to Soviet Ukraine in a 1990 orthographic reform under glasnost.
In Belarusian, the plosive realization of the Proto-Slavic voiced velar plosive has been preserved root-internally in the consonant clusters ‹зг›, ‹жг›, ‹дзг›, and ‹джг› (in words such as мазгі [mazˈɡi], вэдзгаць [ˈvɛdzɡatsʲ] or джгаць [ˈʤɡatsʲ] but not on a morphological boundary, as in згадаць [zɣaˈdatsʲ], in which /z/ is a prefix). It is present in common loanwords such as ганак [ˈɡanak], гузік [ˈɡuzʲik], or гандаль [ˈɡandalʲ]. In the 20th century, some Belarusian linguists, notably Jan Stankievič, promoted both the reintroduction of the practice of pronouncing Latin ‹g›, at least in newly assimilated words, and the adoption of the letter ‹ґ› to represent it. However, consensus on this has never been reached, and the letter has never been part of standard Belarusian alphabet and saw only sporadic periods of use. For example, a code of alternative Belarusian orthography rules, based on the proposal of Vincuk Viačorka and published in 2005, has the optional letter ‹ґ› included in the alphabet, but it is optional and can be replaced by ‹г›.
Form
Regular (non-cursive) uppercase and lowercase forms of this letter look similarly corresponding regular (non-cursive) uppercase and lowercase forms of the "Гг" letter, but with additional upturn. Handwritten (cursive) uppercase and lowercase forms of this letter are displayed at the image to the left.