Turned g

Turned g (lowercase: ᵷ, mathematical symbol: ⅁) is a letter of the Latin alphabet, formed by rotating g 180°. It is used to transliterate the Georgian letter ჹ. ჹ itself is the Georgian letter გ "g" rotated.

Turned g
ᵷ ⅁
Usage
Writing system	Latin script
Type	alphabetic
Language of origin	Tabasaran language, Karaim language, Kwakʼwala, multiple phonetic trascriptions
Sound values	[ɣ]
In Unicode	U+1D77
History
Development	(speculated origin) Γ γ 𐌂 C c G g ᵷ ⅁
Time period	1844, 1880, 1892-1921, 1900, 1929, 1959, 1965
This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.

Usage

ᵷ in Beniowski's alphabet.

In 1844, Bartłomiej Beniowski [pl] created his Anti-absurd or Phenotypic alphabet, featuring turned g for the diphthong [aʊ].

In 1880, John Wesley Powell created a phonetic transcription for transcribing Native American languages in publications of the Smithsonian Institution. In the transcriptions, turned letters were used as supplementary characters.^[1]

Turned g as a proposed symbol of the International Phonetic Alphabet.

In 1900, turned g was a proposed phonetic symbol in the International Phonetic Association’s Exposé des principes to represent a voiceless laminal closed postalveolar sibilant, as found in Adyghe, and other Northwest Caucasian languages.^[2]

Franz Boas used turned g to represent the voiced velar fricative [ɣ] in his transcription of the Kwakʼwala language, published in American Anthropologist in 1900.^[3]

In 1921, Ivar Adolf Lyttkens [sv] and Fredrik Amadeus Wulff [sv] used turned g in their phonetic transcription, notably in Metodiska ljudöfningar published in 1892^[4] or the dictionary Svensk ordlista published in 1921.^[5]

In 1929, Tadeusz Jan Kowalski used the turned g and turned k in Karaim language texts to represent an alveolar plosive pronounced as a velar plosive before the vowel [i]. Omeljan Pritsak reused this in a 1959 Karaim work.^[6]

Turned g represents a [ɢ] in the transcription of the Tabasaran language by Alexander Amarovich Magometov [ru] in his book Табасаранский язык: Исследование и тексты (Tabasaranskij jazyk: Issledovanie i teksty, “The Tabasaran language: analysis and texts”) published in 1965.^[7]

A 19th century Gamilaraay text, using a rotated capital G for ŋ.

A rotated capital G has sometimes been used as a substitute for the similar-looking eng [ŋ]. The capital has not been encoded in Unicode, but the character Turned sans serif capital G (⅁) U+2141 may look similar to it in sans serif fonts (when it is turned, not reversed^[8]).

Computing codes

ᵷ was added to Unicode 4.1 in 2005, as U+1D77. Fonts that can display the character include Code2000, Doulos SIL and Charis SIL. Lowercase "b with hook" (ɓ), an IPA letter that resembles a turned one-story g, is more widely available as a substitute, at U+0253. The Turned sans serif capital G (⅁) U+2141 is not its uppercase, as it is intended to only be a mathematical sans serif symbol (like ∃ or ∀) for the game quantifier used by some authors.

Character information

Preview	⅁		ᵷ
Unicode name	TURNED SANS-SERIF CAPITAL G		LATIN SMALL LETTER TURNED G
Encodings	decimal	hex	dec	hex
Unicode	8513	U+2141	7543	U+01D77
UTF-8	226 133 129	E2 85 81	225 181 183	E1 B5 B7
Numeric character reference	⅁	⅁	ᵷ	ᵷ