Gha

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The letter Ƣ (minuscule: ƣ) was used in the Latin orthographies of various, mostly Turkic languages, such as Azeri or the Jaꞑalif orthography for Tatar.[1] It was also included in the pinyin-based alphabets for Kazakh and Uyghur and in the 1928 Soviet Kurdish Latin alphabet.[2] It usually represents a voiced velar fricative Template:IPAblink but is sometimes used for a voiced uvular fricative Template:IPAblink. All orthographies that used the letter were phased out, and it is not supported in all Latin fonts. It can still be seen in pre-1983 books published in the People’s Republic of China.Script error: No such module "Unsubst".

File:Sütterlin-Q.png
Letters Ƣ and ƣ of Sütterlin script

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 Template:IPAblink 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).[3]

In alphabetical order, it comes between G and H.

Modern replacements

Unicode

Script error: No such module "labelled list hatnote". In Unicode, the majuscule Ƣ is encoded in the Latin Extended-B block at U+01A2 and the minuscule ƣ is encoded at U+01A3.[4] The assigned names, "Template:Sc2" and "Template:Sc2" respectively, are acknowledged by the Unicode Consortium to be mistakes, as gha is unrelated to the letters O and I.[5] The Unicode Consortium therefore has provided the character name aliases "Template:Sc2" and "Template:Sc2".[4]

In popular culture

Thomas Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow features an episode purporting to be the story of a Soviet officer, Tchitcherine, dispatched to Kirghizstan to serve on a committee tasked with devising an alphabet for the Kyrgyz language. Tchitcherine's particular contribution is the invention of the letter Ƣ, which is thus perhaps the only obsolete letter of a Central Asian language that may be familiar to the non-specialist, English-reading public through a widely circulated novel.

References

Template:Reflist

Template:Latin script

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