Ge with upturn
Encyclopedia
Ge with upturn is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet
. In Ukrainian
, Urum
and Rusyn
, this letter is called "Ge", and the letter ⟨Г⟩ is called "He". In Unicode
this letter is called "Ghe with upturn".
The letterform
of Ge with upturn is based on the Cyrillic letter Ge
(Г г), but its handwritten and italic lowercase forms do not follow the italic modification of Ge (г).
It represents the voiced velar plosive
/ɡ/, like the pronunciation of ⟨g⟩ in "go".
Ge with upturn is romanized using the Latin letter G.
[ɡ] is represented in most Cyrillic orthographies by the letter ⟨Г
⟩, called ге ge in most languages. In Ukrainian, however, sometime around the early thirteenth century, this sound lenited
to the voiced velar fricative
[ɣ] (except in the cluster *zg), and around the sixteenth 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 reintroduced 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 to denote the sound of Latin ⟨g⟩ in assimilated words. Later the practice of distinguishing this sound and using the digraph disappeared from Belarusian orthography.
The letter ⟨ґ⟩ was first introduced into the Slavic alphabet in 1619 by Meletius Smotrytsky
in his "Slavic Grammar" (Грамматіки славєнскиѧ правилноє Сѵнтаґма). Later it, serving an identical purpose, was saved in the new orthography of the Ukrainian language
.
The letter ⟨ґ⟩ was eliminated from the Ukrainian alphabet
in the Soviet orthographic reforms of 1933, its function subsumed into that of the letter ⟨г⟩, pronounced [ɦ] in Ukrainian. However, ⟨ґ⟩ continued to be used by Ukrainians in Galicia (under Poland until 1939) and in the Ukrainian diaspora
worldwide. It was reintroduced to Soviet Ukraine in a 1990 orthographic reform under Glasnost
.
During the twentieth century, some Belarusian linguists, notably Yan Stankyevich, promoted both the reintroduction of the practice of pronouncing Latin ⟨g⟩ in, at least, newly assimilated words, and the adoption of letter ⟨ґ⟩ to represent it. However, consensus on this has never been reached, and this letter has never been part of standard Belarusian alphabet
, seeing only sporadic periods of use. For example, a code of alternative Belarusian orthography rules, based on the proposal of V. Vyachorka and published in 2005, has the optional letter ⟨ґ⟩ included in the alphabet, but its use is not obligatory and in any case it can be replaced by ⟨г⟩.
Cyrillic alphabet
The Cyrillic script or azbuka is an alphabetic writing system developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the 10th century AD at the Preslav Literary School...
. In Ukrainian
Ukrainian alphabet
The Ukrainian alphabet is the set of letters used to write Ukrainian, the official language of Ukraine. It is one of the national variations of the Cyrillic script....
, Urum
Urum language
Urum is a Turkic language spoken by several thousand people who inhabit a few villages in the Southeastern Ukraine and in diaspora communities worldwide. The Urum language is often considered a variant of the Crimean Tatar language....
and Rusyn
Rusyn language
Rusyn , also known in English as Ruthenian, is an East Slavic language variety spoken by the Rusyns of Central Europe. Some linguists treat it as a distinct language and it has its own ISO 639-3 code; others treat it as a dialect of Ukrainian...
, this letter is called "Ge", and the letter ⟨Г⟩ is called "He". In Unicode
Unicode
Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
this letter is called "Ghe with upturn".
The letterform
Letterform
A letterform, letter-form or letter form, is a term used especially in typography, paleography, calligraphy and epigraphy to mean a letter's shape.In one sense, letterform applies strictly to the design of individual letters...
of Ge with upturn is based on the Cyrillic letter Ge
Ge (Cyrillic)
Ge is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet. It is also known in some languages as He. In Unicode this letter is called "Ghe".It commonly represents the voiced velar plosive , like the pronunciation of ⟨g⟩ in "go"....
(Г г), but its handwritten and italic lowercase forms do not follow the italic modification of Ge (г).
It represents the voiced velar plosive
Voiced velar plosive
The voiced velar plosive is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is g. Strictly, the IPA symbol is the so-called "opentail G" , though the "looptail G" is...
/ɡ/, like the pronunciation of ⟨g⟩ in "go".
Ge with upturn is romanized using the Latin letter G.
History
The common Slavic voiced velar plosiveVoiced velar plosive
The voiced velar plosive is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is g. Strictly, the IPA symbol is the so-called "opentail G" , though the "looptail G" is...
[ɡ] is represented in most Cyrillic orthographies by the letter ⟨Г
Ge (Cyrillic)
Ge is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet. It is also known in some languages as He. In Unicode this letter is called "Ghe".It commonly represents the voiced velar plosive , like the pronunciation of ⟨g⟩ in "go"....
⟩, called ге ge in most languages. In Ukrainian, however, sometime around the early thirteenth century, this sound lenited
Lenition
In linguistics, lenition is a kind of sound change that alters consonants, making them "weaker" in some way. The word lenition itself means "softening" or "weakening" . Lenition can happen both synchronically and diachronically...
to the voiced velar fricative
Voiced velar fricative
The voiced velar fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in various spoken languages. It is not found in English today, but did exist in Old English...
[ɣ] (except in the cluster *zg), and around the sixteenth century debuccalized
Debuccalization
Debuccalization is a sound change in which a consonant loses its original place of articulation and becomes or . The pronunciation of a consonant as is sometimes called aspiration, but in phonetics aspiration is the burst of air accompanying a plosive...
to the voiced glottal fricative [ɦ] (like the pronunciation of ⟨h⟩ in "behind"). The phoneme
Phoneme
In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....
continued to be represented by ⟨Г⟩, called ге he in Ukrainian.
Within a century after this sound change began, [ɡ] was reintroduced 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
Digraph (orthography)
A digraph or digram is a pair of characters used to write one phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined...
⟨кг⟩ (kh) were sometimes used to denote the sound of Latin ⟨g⟩ in assimilated words. Later the practice of distinguishing this sound and using the digraph disappeared from Belarusian orthography.
The letter ⟨ґ⟩ was first introduced into the Slavic alphabet in 1619 by Meletius Smotrytsky
Meletius Smotrytsky
Meletius Smotrytsky , né Maksym Herasymovytch was a Ruthenian linguist from Galicia, author and religious activist. Son of the famous Ukrainian religious and political activist Herasym Smotrytsky. He was educated in Ostroh and Vilnius, as well as Leipzig, Wittenberg and Nuremberg...
in his "Slavic Grammar" (Грамматіки славєнскиѧ правилноє Сѵнтаґма). Later it, serving an identical purpose, was saved in the new orthography of the Ukrainian language
Ukrainian language
Ukrainian is a language of the East Slavic subgroup of the Slavic languages. It is the official state language of Ukraine. Written Ukrainian uses a variant of the Cyrillic alphabet....
.
The letter ⟨ґ⟩ was eliminated from the Ukrainian alphabet
Ukrainian alphabet
The Ukrainian alphabet is the set of letters used to write Ukrainian, the official language of Ukraine. It is one of the national variations of the Cyrillic script....
in the Soviet orthographic reforms of 1933, its function subsumed into that of the letter ⟨г⟩, pronounced [ɦ] in Ukrainian. However, ⟨ґ⟩ continued to be used by Ukrainians in Galicia (under Poland until 1939) and in the Ukrainian diaspora
Diaspora
A diaspora is "the movement, migration, or scattering of people away from an established or ancestral homeland" or "people dispersed by whatever cause to more than one location", or "people settled far from their ancestral homelands".The word has come to refer to historical mass-dispersions of...
worldwide. It was reintroduced to Soviet Ukraine in a 1990 orthographic reform under Glasnost
Glasnost
Glasnost was the policy of maximal publicity, openness, and transparency in the activities of all government institutions in the Soviet Union, together with freedom of information, introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev in the second half of the 1980s...
.
During the twentieth century, some Belarusian linguists, notably Yan Stankyevich, promoted both the reintroduction of the practice of pronouncing Latin ⟨g⟩ in, at least, newly assimilated words, and the adoption of letter ⟨ґ⟩ to represent it. However, consensus on this has never been reached, and this letter has never been part of standard Belarusian alphabet
Belarusian alphabet
The Belarusian alphabet is based on the Cyrillic script and is derived from the alphabet of the Old Church Slavonic language. The alphabet has existed in its modern form since 1918 and consists of thirty-two letters...
, seeing only sporadic periods of use. For example, a code of alternative Belarusian orthography rules, based on the proposal of V. Vyachorka and published in 2005, has the optional letter ⟨ґ⟩ included in the alphabet, but its use is not obligatory and in any case it can be replaced by ⟨г⟩.
Related letters and other similar characters
- Г г : Cyrillic letter GeGe (Cyrillic)Ge is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet. It is also known in some languages as He. In Unicode this letter is called "Ghe".It commonly represents the voiced velar plosive , like the pronunciation of ⟨g⟩ in "go"....
- G g : Latin letter GGG is the seventh letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The letter 'G' was introduced in the Old Latin period as a variant of ⟨c⟩ to distinguish voiced, from voiceless, . The recorded originator of ⟨g⟩ is freedman Spurius Carvilius Ruga, the first Roman to open a fee-paying school,...
Computing codes
| character | Ґ | ґ | ||
| Unicode name | CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER GHE WITH UPTURN |
CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER GHE WITH UPTURN |
||
| character encoding | decimal | hex | decimal | hex |
| Unicode Unicode Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems... |
1168 | 0490 | 1169 | 0491 |
| UTF-8 UTF-8 UTF-8 is a multibyte character encoding for Unicode. Like UTF-16 and UTF-32, UTF-8 can represent every character in the Unicode character set. Unlike them, it is backward-compatible with ASCII and avoids the complications of endianness and byte order marks... |
210 144 | D2 90 | 210 145 | D2 91 |
| Numeric character reference Numeric character reference A numeric character reference is a common markup construct used in SGML and other SGML-related markup languages such as HTML and XML. It consists of a short sequence of characters that, in turn, represent a single character from the Universal Character Set of Unicode... |
Ґ | Ґ | ґ | ґ |
| KOI8-U KOI8-U KOI8-U is an 8-bit character encoding, designed to cover Ukrainian, which uses the Cyrillic alphabet. It is based on KOI8-R, which covers Russian and Bulgarian, but replaces eight graphic characters with four Ukrainian letters Ґ, Є, І, and Ї in both upper case and lower case.In Microsoft Windows,... |
189 | BD | 173 | AD |
| Windows-1251 Windows-1251 Windows-1251 is a popular 8-bit character encoding, designed to cover languages that use the Cyrillic alphabet such as Russian, Bulgarian, Serbian Cyrillic and other languages... |
165 | A5 | 180 | B4 |
| Macintosh Cyrillic | 162 | A2 | 182 | B6 |
Further reading
- George Y. Shevelov (1977). “On the Chronology of H and the New G in Ukrainian”, in Harvard Ukrainian Studies, vol 1, no 2 (June 1977), pp 137–52. Cambridge: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.
- Да рэформы беларускай азбукі. // Пасяджэньні Беларускае Акадэмічнае Конфэрэнцыі па рэформе правапісу і азбукі. - Мн.: [б. м.], [1927?].
- Ян Станкевіч. Гук «ґ» у беларускай мове // Ян Станкевіч. Збор твораў у двух тамах. Т. 2. - Мн.: Энцыклапедыкс, 2002. ISBN 985-6599-46-6