Ĝ
Ĝ or ĝ (G circumflex) is a consonant in Esperanto orthography, representing a voiced postalveolar affricate (either palato-alveolar or retroflex), and is equivalent to a voiced postalveolar affricate /dʒ/ or a voiced retroflex affricate /dʐ/.
G with Circumflex | |
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Ĝ ĝ | |
Usage | |
Writing system | Latin |
Language of origin | Esperanto |
Phonetic usage | |
Unicode codepoint | U+011C, U+011D |
History | |
Development | |
Other | |
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While Esperanto orthography uses a diacritic for its four postalveolar consonants, as do the Latin-based Slavic alphabets, the base letters are Romano-Germanic. Ĝ is based on the letter g, which has this sound in English and Italian before the vowels i and e (with some exceptions in English), to better preserve the shape of borrowings from those languages (such as ĝenerala from general) than Slavic đ (Serbo-Croatian) or dž would.
Ĝ is the ninth letter in Esperanto orthography. Although it is written as gx and gh respectively in the x-system and h-system workarounds, it is normally written as G with a circumflex: ĝ.
Uses of Ĝ in other languages
In Haida, a language isolate, the letter ĝ was sometimes used to represent pharyngeal voiced fricative /ʕ/.
In Aleut, an Eskaleut language, ĝ represents a voiced uvular fricative /ʁ/. The corresponding voiceless Aleut sound is represented by x̂.
In Dutch, the letter ĝ is used in some phrase books and dictionaries for pronunciation help. It represents a plosive [ɡ], because g is pronounced as a fricative /ɣ/ in Dutch.
In some transcriptions of Sumerian, ĝ is used to represent the velar nasal /ŋ/.
Character mappings
Preview | Ĝ | ĝ | ||
---|---|---|---|---|
Unicode name | LATIN CAPITAL LETTER G WITH CIRCUMFLEX | LATIN SMALL LETTER G WITH CIRCUMFLEX | ||
Encodings | decimal | hex | dec | hex |
Unicode | 284 | U+011C | 285 | U+011D |
UTF-8 | 196 156 | C4 9C | 196 157 | C4 9D |
Numeric character reference | Ĝ | Ĝ | ĝ | ĝ |
Named character reference | Ĝ | ĝ |