What is "ghayn"

n. The letter غ in the Arabic script.

The Arabic letter ( or ) is the nineteenth letter of the Arabic alphabet, one of the six letters not in the twenty-two akin to the Phoenician alphabet (the others being , , , , ). It is the twenty-second letter in the new Persian alphabet. It represents the sound or . In Persian language it represents ~. In name and shape, it is a variant of ʻayn . Its numerical value is 1000 (see Abjad numerals).

A voiced velar fricative or a voiced uvular fricative (usually reconstructed for Proto-Semitic) merged with ʻ ayin in most languages except for Arabic, Ugaritic, and older varieties of the Canaanite languages. Canaanite languages and Hebrew later also merged it with ʻayin, and this merger was complete in Tiberian Hebrew. The South Arabian alphabet retained a symbol for , .

The letter is sometimes used to represent the voiced velar plosive in loan words and names in Arabic and is then often pronounced , not , such as the word for Bulgaria . Other letters, such as , , (also , , , , , instead of the original Arabic letters), can be used to transcribe in loan words and names, depending on whether the local variety of Arabic in the country has the phoneme , which letter represents it if it does, and on whether it is customary in the country to use that letter to transcribe . For instance, in Egypt, where is pronounced as in all situations, even when speaking Modern Standard Arabic (except in certain contexts, such as reciting the Qur'an), is used to transcribe foreign in virtually all contexts. In many cases is pronounced in loan words as expected—, not —even though the original language had .

When representing this sound in transliteration of Arabic into Hebrew, it is written as ע׳.

In English, the letter in Arabic names is usually transliterated as ‹›, ‹›, or simply ‹g›, e.g. ' Baghdad', or ' Gaza', the latter of which does not render the sound ~ accurately. The closest equivalent sound known to most English speakers is the Parisian French " r" .

is written is several ways depending in its position in the word:

Proto-Semitic

Akkadian

Arabic

Canaanite

Hebrew

Aramaic

South Arabian

Geʻez

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phoenician ayin.png

Ghayn (Ғ ғ; italics: Ғ ғ) also known as Ge with stroke, or as Ayn (in Kazakh), is a letter of the Cyrillic script. In Unicode this letter is called "Ghe with stroke".

It is used in the Bashkir, Karakalpak, Kazakh, Uzbek and Tajik languages, where it represents the voiced uvular fricative . Despite having a similar shape, it is not related to the Latin letter F (F f) or the Greek letter Digamma (Ϝ ϝ). In Kazakh and Tofa, this letter may also represent the voiced velar fricative . In Nivkh, ғ represents , while is represented by ӻ, which looks like ғ with a hook. The Khakas language also uses ғ.

In earlier, Arabic-alphabet-based orthographies for some of these languages, the same sound was written with the letter ﻍ ( ġayn/ghain).