Ghayn
The Arabic letter is one of the six letters the Arabic alphabet added to the twenty-two inherited from the Phoenician alphabet. It represents the sound or. In name and shape, it is a variant of ʻayn. Its numerical value is 1000. In Persian, it represents ~ and is the twenty-second letter in the new Persian alphabet.
is written in several ways depending on its position in the word:
History
merged with ʻayn in most Semitic languages except for Arabic, Ugaritic and older varieties of the Canaanite languages. The South Arabian alphabet retained a symbol for,. Biblical Hebrew, as of the 3rd century BCE, apparently still distinguished the phonemes and , based on transcriptions in the Septuagint, such as that of the name "Gomorrah" as Gomorrha for the Hebrew ‘Ămōrā. Canaanite languages, including Hebrew, later also merged with ʻayin, and the merger was complete in Tiberian Hebrew.Usage
The letter is preferred in the Levant, and by Aljazeera TV channel, to represent, e.g., w:ar:هونغ كونغ, w:ar:البرتغال, w:ar:أغسطس, and w:ar:غاندالف. Foreign publications and TV channels in Arabic, e.g. Deutsche Welle, and Alhurra, follow this practice. It is then often pronounced, not, though in many cases, غ is pronounced in loanwords as expected.Other letters can be used to transcribe in loanwords and names, depending on whether the local variety of Arabic in the country has the phoneme, and if it does, which letter represents it and whether it is customary in the country to use that letter to transcribe. For instance, in Egypt, where ج is pronounced as in all situations even in Modern Standard Arabic, ج is used to transcribe foreign in all contexts. The same applies to coastal Yemen, as well as Oman. In Algeria and Tunisia, it is or a three-dotted qāf ; the Arabian peninsula, it is . In Iraq, gaf or kaf is more used. In Morocco, a three-dotted kāf or kāf is used. In Lebanon and Israel, a three-dotted jīm is often used to create the phoneme in names and foreign loanwords, such as in چامبيا.
When representing the sound in transliteration of Arabic into Hebrew, it is written as ע׳ or ר׳. In English, the letter غ in Arabic names is usually transliterated as,, or simply g: بغداد 'Baghdad', قرغيزستان 'Kyrgyzstan', سنغافورة 'Singapore', or غزة 'Gaza', the last of which does not render the sound ~ accurately. The closest equivalent sound to be known to most English-speakers is the Parisian French "r". The Maltese alphabet is written in the Latin alphabet, the only Semitic language to do so in its standard form, and uses ⟨g⟩. It is usually represented as voiced velar plosive.
Turkish ğ, which in modern speech has no sound of its own, used to be spelled as غ in the Ottoman script and pronounced as. Other Turkic languages also use this Latin equivalent of ghayn, such as Tatar, which pronounces it as , and Azerbaijani, which pronounces it as. In Arabic words and names where there is an ayin, Tatar adds the ghayn instead.