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/.

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, to better preserve the shape of borrowings from those languages (such as ĝenerala from general) than Slavic đ would.

Ĝ is the ninth letter of the Esperanto alphabet. Although it is written as gx in the x-system and gh in the h-system, it is G with a circumflex (ĝ) when written accented. L. L. Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto, recommended using gh when ĝ is not available.

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 Eskimo-Aleut 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/.

See also


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