Ge (Cyrillic)
Encyclopedia
Ge is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet
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...

. It is also known in some languages as 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".

It commonly 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 is generally romanized using the Latin letter G; but when romanizing Belarusian
Belarusian language
The Belarusian language , sometimes referred to as White Russian or White Ruthenian, is the language of the Belarusian people...

, Ukrainian
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....

 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...

, the Latin letter H is used.

History

The Cyrillic letter Ge was derived directly from the Greek letter Gamma
Gamma
Gamma is the third letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 3. It was derived from the Phoenician letter Gimel . Letters that arose from Gamma include the Roman C and G and the Cyrillic letters Ge Г and Ghe Ґ.-Greek:In Ancient Greek, gamma represented a...

 (Γ γ), but the lowercase Ge is a small version of the capital letter.

In the Early Cyrillic alphabet
Early Cyrillic alphabet
The Early Cyrillic alphabet is a writing system developed in the First Bulgarian Empire in the 9th or 10th century to write the Old Church Slavonic liturgical language...

 its name was (ɡlaɡoli), meaning "speak".

In the Cyrillic numeral system
Cyrillic numerals
The Cyrillic numerals are a numbering system derived from the Cyrillic script, used by South and East Slavic peoples. The system was used in Russia as late as the early 18th century when Peter the Great replaced it with Arabic numerals....

, Ge had a numerical value of 3.

Macedonian and Serbian

In standard Macedonian
Macedonian language
Macedonian is a South Slavic language spoken as a first language by approximately 2–3 million people principally in the region of Macedonia but also in the Macedonian diaspora...

 and Serbian
Serbian language
Serbian is a form of Serbo-Croatian, a South Slavic language, spoken by Serbs in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia and neighbouring countries....

, Ge always 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].

Russian

In standard Russian
Russian language
Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...

, Ge 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], except when it is devoiced to [k] word-finally or before a voiceless consonant, and it represents [ɡʲ] before a palatalizing vowel. In south-western Russia, the sound becomes the 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], and sometimes the glottal fricative [ɦ] in regions bordering Belarus and Ukraine.

It is acceptable to pronounce certain Russian words with [ɣ] (referred to as Ukrainian Ge): (Bog, bogatyj, blago, Gospod’), although not all speakers use or agree with this. The sound is normally considered non-standard or dialectal in Russian and is avoided by educated Russian speakers. (Bog, "God") is always pronounced [box] in the nominative case.

In the Russian adjective/pronoun ending , Ge represents [v], including in the word ("today", from ).

The letter Ge represents a voiceless [x] (not [k]) in front of the letter Ka
Ka (Cyrillic)
Ka is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet.It commonly represents the voiceless velar plosive , like the pronunciation of ⟨k⟩ in "king".-History:...

 in two Russian words, namely, and .

The Latin letter H at the beginning of a word is transliterated into Russian with Ge rather than Kha as one might expect, for historical reasons of phonology/orthography, e.g. hero → .

Bulgarian

In Bulgarian
Bulgarian language
Bulgarian is an Indo-European language, a member of the Slavic linguistic group.Bulgarian, along with the closely related Macedonian language, demonstrates several linguistic characteristics that set it apart from all other Slavic languages such as the elimination of case declension, the...

, the letter Ge represents a 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], except when it is devoiced to [k] word-finally or before a voiceless consonant, and represents [ɡʲ] before a palatalizing vowel.

Belarusian and Ukrainian

In Belarusian
Belarusian language
The Belarusian language , sometimes referred to as White Russian or White Ruthenian, is the language of the Belarusian people...

 and Ukrainian
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....

, Ge is called He, and represents a voiced glottal fricative [ɦ]—a breathy voice
Breathy voice
Breathy voice is a phonation in which the vocal cords vibrate, as they do in normal voicing, but are held further apart, so that a larger volume of air escapes between them. This produces an audible noise...

d counterpart of the English [h], (listen).

In Ukrainian, a voiced velar plosive [ɡ] is rarely present, and when present it is written with the Cyrillic letter Ge with upturn
Ge with upturn
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"...

 (Ґ ґ).

Related letters and other similar characters

  • Γ γ : Greek letter Gamma
    Gamma
    Gamma is the third letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 3. It was derived from the Phoenician letter Gimel . Letters that arose from Gamma include the Roman C and G and the Cyrillic letters Ge Г and Ghe Ґ.-Greek:In Ancient Greek, gamma represented a...

  • G g : Latin letter G
    G
    G 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,...

  • Ґ ґ : Cyrillic letter Ge with upturn
    Ge with upturn
    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"...

  • Ѓ ѓ : Cyrillic letter Gje
    Gje
    Gje is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet.It is used in Macedonian to represent the voiced palatal plosive or the voiced alveolo-palatal affricate , similar to the pronunciation of ⟨j⟩ in "jet"....


Computing codes

character Г г
Unicode name CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER GHE
CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER GHE
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...

 
1043 0413 1075 0433
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...

 
208 147 D0 93 208 179 D0 B3
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...

 
Г Г г г
KOI8-R
KOI8-R
KOI8-R is an 8-bit character encoding, designed to cover Russian, which uses the Cyrillic alphabet. It also happens to cover Bulgarian, but is not used since CP1251 is accepted. A derivative encoding is KOI8-U, which adds Ukrainian characters...

 and 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,...

 
231 E7 199 C7
CP 855
Code page 855
Code page 855 is a code page used under MS-DOS to write Cyrillic script. This code page is not used much.-Code page layout:...

 
173 AD 172 AC
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...

 
195 C3 227 E3
ISO-8859-5  179 B3 211 D3
Mac Cyrillic
MacCyrillic encoding
The Macintosh Cyrillic encoding is used in Apple Macintosh computers to represent texts in the Cyrillic script.Each character is shown with its equivalent Unicode code point and its decimal code point. Only the second half of the table is shown, the first half being the same as ASCII....

131 83 227 E3
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
x
OK