Gha

For other uses, see GHA (disambiguation).

The letter Ƣ (minuscule: ƣ) has been used in various Latin orthographies for Turkic languages, such as Azeri or the Jaŋalif orthography for Tatar. It usually represents a voiced velar fricative, but is sometimes used for a voiced uvular fricative. All orthographies using it have been phased out, so the letter is not well-supported in fonts. It can still be seen on pre-1983 banknotes issued by the People’s Republic of China.^{[citation needed]}

Letters Q and q of Sütterlin script

Historically, it is derived from a hand-written form of the small Latin letter q, circa 1900. The majuscule is then based on the minuscule. Its use for [ɣ] stems from the linguistic tradition of representing such sounds (and similars) by q in Turkic languages and in transcriptions of Arabic or Persian (c.f. kaf vs. qof).

In alphabetical order, it comes between G and H.

Unrelated letters transcribed gha, typically representing a voiced aspirated stop rather than a fricative, occur in scripts descended from Brāhmī script.

Modern Replacements

• Azeri: Ğ, ğ
• Tatar: Г, г (Cyrillic), Ğ, ğ (Latin)
• Bashkir: Ғ,ғ
• Uyghur: غ (Arabic), Ғ, ғ (Cyrillic), GH gh (Latin)
• Yakut: Ҕ, ҕ
• Uzbek: Gʻ gʻ

Unicode

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. It has been misnamed by ISO as “LATIN LETTER OI”.

References

The ISO basic Latin alphabet
Aa	Bb	Cc	Dd	Ee	Ff	Gg	Hh	Ii	Jj	Kk	Ll	Mm	Nn	Oo	Pp	Qq	Rr	Ss	Tt	Uu	Vv	Ww	Xx	Yy	Zz
Letter Q with diacritics
Ɋɋ	Ƣƣ	ʠ
Related
History Palaeography Derivations Diacritics Punctuation Numerals Unicode List of letters ISO/IEC 646