'Ge' or 'He' (, , italics: ''Г'', ''г'') is a letter of the
Cyrillic alphabet, representing or in different languages.
It arose directly from the Greek letter
gamma and both capital and small Ge look like the capital letter gamma.
In standard
Serbian,
Bulgarian and
Macedonian languages Ge always represents
voiced velar plosive , i.e., it is pronounced like the
G in English ''go''.
In standard
Russian, it represents a
voiced velar plosive except when it is devoiced to word-finally or before a voiceless consonant and represents before a
palatalizing vowel. Also, in some masculine genitive and accusative case word endings, it represents when found between two vowels. In south-western Russia, the sound becomes a fricative , and sometimes in regions bordering Belarus and Ukraine.
[1]
In the
Ukrainian and
Belarusian languages it is called ''He'', and represents a
voiced glottal fricative ()—a
voiced counterpart of the English
h.
In Ukrainian, a voiced velar plosive is rarely present, and when present it is to be written with the Ukrainian letter
ge with upturn (Ґ, ґ). In the Belarusian language, it was supposedly more frequent (to render words borrowed from
Polish and Russian), but during the twentieth century the distinction in usage blurred significantly. Reintroduction of ge into the Belarusian alphabet is only proposed by some linguists and not supported officially.
Code positions
Its
HTML entities are: Г or Г for capital and г or г for small letter.
Notes
1. "Zvuki na meste bukvy g" (Sounds in place of the letter г), map 14 in the Scholarly Dialectical Atlas
See also
★
Gje,
Ghe,
G,
Gamma