Ğ: Encyclopedia - Ğ

Ğ

Ğ, or ğ, is a letter, known as g-breve in English, used in the Turkish, Azerbaijani and Tatar languages. The unicode code point is U+011E for the capital letter and U+011F for the small letter.

Ğ - Turkish use

In Turkish, the ğ is known as yumuşak ge 'soft g' and is the ninth letter of the Turkish alphabet. It has no independent pronunciation, but rather indicates a lengthening of the preceding vowel, which normally does not appear in Turkish when the ğ is absent. For example, dağ (mountain) is pronounced something like daa. The effect of the ğ can be compared to the effect of the gh in 'brought'. The ğ must be located after a vowel and can therefore not be the initial letter of a word. When found after the vowels e, i, ö or ü, the ğ is pronounced as y (consonant). When found between two vowels, it is sometimes pronounced as y as well. The standard romanization of ğ is gh. Sometimes g is used incorrectly. In rare cases, the phonetic ɣ (gamma) or the Greek letter γ is used. Some webpages may also use Ð and ð due to improper encoding; see Turkish characters for the reasons of this.

Ğ - Azerbaijani and Tatar use

In Azerbaijani and Tatar, ğ is pronounced as gh (IPA: [ɣ]), a voiced velar fricative. The Ğ is used as initial letter in Tatar only. For example, Ğabdulla is the Tatar way of writing the name Arabic name Abdullah. (in Tatar language ayn and ghayn Arabic letters were both pronounced as ğ)

Ğ - Ğ in names

• Mahir Çağrı
• Recep Tayyip Erdoğan
• Naim Süleymanoğlu
• Ğabdulla Tuqay

Ğ - Confusions of Ğ

Ğ for non-professional eye can be easily confused with Latvian letter Ģ, because the minuscule of Ģ is ģ. So, logically majuscule should be something like Ğ.

See also

• Ǧ

Categories: Diacritics | Uncommon Latin letters

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Ğ", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki