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
Ĝ ĝ
Gx gx, Gh gh
Usage
Writing systemLatin
Typealphabetic
Language of originEsperanto, Aleut language, Khinalug language, Toba Qom language
Sound values
In UnicodeU+011C, U+011D
History
Development
Pictogram of a Camel (speculated origin)
TransliterationsГ̑ г̑, Ӷ ӷ, Гг гг
VariationsGx gx, Gh gh
Other
Writing directionLeft to right
This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.

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 would.[1]

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

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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 .

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

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Character information
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

See also

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References

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  1. ^ "Unicode Character "Ĝ" (U+011C)". Compart. Oak Brook, IL: Compart AG. 2021. Retrieved 2024-02-17.