Ghe with upturn (Ґ ґ; italics: Ґ ґ), also known as Ge or G, is a letter of the Cyrillic script. It is part of the Ukrainian alphabet, the Pannonian Rusyn alphabet and both the Carpathian Rusyn alphabets, and also some variants of the Urum and Belarusian (i.e. Belarusian Classical Orthography) alphabets. In these languages it is usually called ge, while the letter it follows, ⟨Г г⟩ is called he. In the Unicode system for text encoding, this letter is called ghe with upturn.
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.
It represents the voiced velar plosive , like the pronunciation of ⟨g⟩ in "go".
Ghe with upturn is usually romanized using the Latin letter g, or sometimes ġ with a dot or g̀ with a grave accent.
History
The common Slavic voiced velar plosive is represented in most Cyrillic orthographies by ⟨Г⟩, called ге, ge, in most languages. In Ukrainian, however, around the early 13th century, the sound lenited to the voiced velar fricative (except in the cluster *zg), and around the 16th century, debuccalized to the voiced glottal fricative . The phoneme continued to be represented by ⟨Г⟩, called ге, he, in Ukrainian.
Within a century after this sound change began, 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, to bring the Ukrainian language closer to Russian, its function being subsumed into that of the letter ⟨г⟩, pronounced in Ukrainian as . However, ⟨ґ⟩ continued to be used by Ukrainians in Galicia (part of Poland until 1939) and in the Ukrainian diaspora worldwide, who all continued to follow the Kharkiv orthography of 1928 (the so-called skrypnykivka, after Mykola Skrypnyk). It was reintroduced to Soviet Ukraine in a 1990 orthographic reform under glasnost, just before independence in 1991. A 2017 study of legal documents found that the letter had returned to active usage in Ukraine.
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 , вэдзгаць or джгаць but not on a morphological boundary, as in згадаць , in which is a prefix). It is present in common loanwords such as ганак , гузік , or гандаль . 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 the 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 can be replaced by ⟨г⟩.
Usage in Slavic languages
Belarusian
The letter ґ next to г is used in the so-called "Taraškievica" - the classical spelling of the Belarusian language.
An attempt to differentiate in writing the transmission of sounds /ɣ/ and /g/, using along with the letter Г, г, a special letter Ґ, ґ, which differed in size and shape, took place in the history of the Old Belarusian language.