Ge (Cyrillic)


Ge, ghe, or he is a letter of the Cyrillic script. Most commonly, it represents the voiced velar plosive, like the in "gift", or the voiced glottal fricative, like the in "heft". It is generally romanized using the Latin letter g or h, depending on the source language.

History

The Cyrillic letter ge was derived directly from the Greek letter Gamma in uncial script.
In the Early Cyrillic alphabet, its name was глаголь, meaning "speak".
In the Cyrillic numeral system, it had a numerical value of 3.

Usage

Slavic languages

Belarusian, Rusyn, and Ukrainian

From these three languages, the letter is romanized with h. Its name is he in Belarusian and Ukrainian, and hy in Rusyn.
In Belarusian, the letter corresponds to the velar fricative and its soft counterpart.
In Ukrainian and Rusyn, it represents a voiced glottal fricative, a breathy voiced counterpart of the English.
In Ukrainian and Rusyn, a voiced velar plosive is written with the Cyrillic letter ghe with upturn. In Belarusian, the official orthography uses г for both and , although in Taraškievica ghe with upturn is optionally used for. Ґ is transliterated with G.
In all three languages' historical ancestor Ruthenian, the sound was also represented by the digraph кг.

Russian

In standard Russian, ghe represents the voiced velar plosive but is devoiced to word-finally or before a voiceless consonant. It represents before a palatalizing vowel. In the Southern Russian dialect, the sound becomes the velar fricative. Sometimes, the sound is the glottal fricative in the regions bordering Belarus and Ukraine.
It is acceptable, for some people, to pronounce certain Russian words with : Бог, богатый, благо, Господь. The sound is normally considered nonstandard or dialectal in Russian and is avoided by educated Russian speakers. Бог is always pronounced in the nominative case.
In the Russian nominal genitive ending -ого, -его, ghe represents, including in the word сегодня.
It represents a voiceless in front of ka in two Russian words, namely, мягкий and лёгкий, and their derivatives.
The Latin letter h of words of Latin, Greek, English or German origin is usually transliterated into Russian with ghe rather than kha: hero → г'ерой, hamburger → г'амбургер, Haydn → Гайдн. That can occasionally cause ambiguity, as for example English Harry and Gary/''Garry would be spelled the same in Russian, e.g. Гарри Поттер). The reasons for using ghe to write h'' include the fact that ghe is used for h in Ukrainian, Belarusian and some Russian dialects, along with the perception that kha sounds too harsh. Nevertheless, in newer loanwords, kha is often used.

South Slavic

In standard Serbian, Bosnian, Montenegrin, Bulgarian and Macedonian the letter ghe represents a voiced velar plosive. In Bulgarian and Macedonian, it is also devoiced to word-finally or before a voiceless consonant.

Usage in non-Slavic languages

In many non-Slavic languages it can represent both and .
In Ossetian, an Indo-Iranian language spoken in the Caucasus, ⟨г⟩ represents the voiced velar stop. However, the digraph ⟨гъ⟩ represents the voiced uvular fricative.

Cultural references

In the Russian Empire, the name of the letter glagol was an informal reference to the Γ-shaped gallows:

Related letters and other similar characters