Ge or He (Г, г) is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet, pronounced differently in different languages.
It arose directly from the Greek letter gamma and looks exactly like it; that is, capital Ge looks like capital gamma, while small Ge looks like capital gamma, but is smaller.
In standard Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian and Macedonian language Ge is voiced velar plosive, i.e., it is pronounced like the G in "go".
In Ukrainian and Belarusian language it is called "He", and pronounced without the velar stop, i.e., it is voiced glottal fricative (Con-46b.wav)—a voiced counterpart of the English H, while the voiced velar plosive is the voiced counterpart of K.
In Ukrainian voiced velar plosive is rarely present, and when present it is to be written with ghe ( Ґ ). In Belarussian language it was supposedly more frequent (to render words borrowed from Polish and Russian), but during the 20th century the distinction in usage blurred significantly, and reintroduction of ghe into the Belarussian alphabet is only a proposal by some linguists, not supported officially.
Code positions
Its HTML entities are: Г or Г for capital and г or г for small letter.
See also
Last updated: 05-21-2005 15:14:34