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