Gha
The letter Ƣ (minuscule: ƣ) has been used in the Latin orthographies of various, mostly Turkic languages, such as Azeri or the Jaꞑalif orthography for Tatar. It is also included in pinyin alphabets for Kazakh and Uyghur; and in the 1928 Soviet Kurdish Latin alphabet. It usually represents a voiced velar fricative [ɣ] but is sometimes used for a voiced uvular fricative [ʁ]. All orthographies that used the letter have been phased out and so it is not well-supported in fonts. It can still be seen in pre-1983 books published in the People’s Republic of China.
| Gha | |
|---|---|
| Ƣ ƣ | |
| ğ, ꝙ | |
| Usage | |
| Writing system | Latin script |
| Type | Alphabetic |
| Language of origin | Azerbaijani language |
| Phonetic usage | [ɣ] [ʁ] |
| Unicode codepoint | U+01A2, U+01A3 |
| Alphabetical position | 8 (after G) |
| History | |
| Development | |
| Time period | ~1900 to 1983 |
| Descendants | • (None) |
| Sisters | Q Φ φ Փ փ Ֆ ֆ |
| Transliteration equivalents | ğ, q, g, gh, Ғ |
| Variations | ğ, ꝙ |
| Other | |
| Writing direction | Left-to-Right |
Historically, it is derived from a handwritten form of the small Latin letter q around 1900. The majuscule is then based on the minuscule. Its use for [ɣ] stems from the linguistic tradition of representing such sounds (and similar ones) by q in Turkic languages and in transcriptions of Arabic or Persian (compare kaf and qaf).