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 or a voiced retroflex affricate .
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.
Uses of in other languages
In Haida, a language isolate, the letter was sometimes used to represent pharyngeal voiced fricative .
In Aleut, an Eskaleut language, represents a voiced uvular fricative . The corresponding voiceless Aleut sound is represented by x̂.
In Dutch, the letter is used in some phrase books and dictionaries for pronunciation help. It represents a plosive , because is pronounced as a fricative in Dutch.
In some transcriptions of Sumerian, is used to represent the velar nasal .
Character mappings
See also
- Ĉ
- Ĥ
- Ĵ
- Ŝ
- Ŭ