Re: Origin of LATIN LETTER GHA

From: André Szabolcs Szelp (a.sz.szelp@gmail.com)
Date: Wed Sep 24 2008 - 04:36:16 CDT

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    Hello,

    it's origin is indeed latin q/Q, however, the form derives from the
    _small_ letter q, more correctly from it's hand-written form in the
    19th/early 20th century.
    The capital from was derived from the minuscule.
    It's use for [ɣ] stems from the linguistic tradition of representing
    such sounds (and similars) by q in turkic languages, but also in
    transcriptions of arabic/persian. (c.f. kaf vs. qof)

    It's sorting between G and H probably stems from it's association with G:

    In Turkic languages [ɣ] is an allophone of [g] in velar vowel context,
    like [q] is the allophone of [k]. However, even though they are
    allophones, they are tradtionally marked in turkology. (In turkology
    (as a linguistic field of science) actually script-mixing is used,
    k:q, g:γ, but I guess they did not want to introduce latin Gamma into
    an every-day orthographic used latin script, so they derived a
    q-variant for the velar G).

    I guess, these are pretty strong indications on the origin of the
    letter, and also expaining much.

    Szabolcs

    2008/9/23 Benjamin M Scarborough <benjamin.scarborough@student.utdallas.edu>:
    > This has been bothering me for a long time, but what is the origin of
    > Ƣ? It seems to have been introduced in a number of Latin-script
    > orthographies in the U.S.S.R. during the 1920s, but I can't find any
    > information on how the letter was created.
    >
    > Ƣ must have been rather cloudy in origin and use for U+01A2 and U+01A3
    > to have been named LATIN CAPITAL LETTER OI and LATIN SMALL LETTER OI.
    >
    > I've read somewhere that it was based on Q, but that doesn't explain
    > its use for [ɣ] or its position in sorting between G and H.
    >
    > The closest thing I've seen to Ƣ is the Sütterlinschrift forms of the
    > letters G and Q, but somehow that connection seems a little spurious.
    >
    > Can anyone shed some light on this for me?
    >
    > --Ben Scarborough
    >
    >
    >



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