Г, the letter ge

History

Г is the fourth letter of the modern Russian alphabet. Most commonly it represents the voiced velar plosive /ɡ/, like the g in gift, or the voiced glottal fricative [ɦ], like the h in behind; which of the two a page intends depends on the language it is written in. The letter is generally romanized with the Latin letter g or with h, again depending on the source language.

For anyone reading Russian documents written before 1918, the letter turns up in one pattern worth knowing in advance. Nineteenth-century prescriptions spelled the genitive ending of adjectives and participles as -аго, or -яго after soft consonants: добраго, синяго. The 1918 reform replaced -аго with -его after ж, ц, ч, ш and щ, so лучшаго became лучшего; in other instances -аго was replaced with -ого and -яго with -его, so новаго became нового and ранняго became раннего. In adjectival pronouns the ending had already been written -ого or -его before the reform, as in его, нашего, того and какого. One thing the reform deliberately left alone: although the letter г in these endings sounds as в in standard Russian pronunciation, it was not changed. An ending written with г and spoken with a v is the ordinary state of the language, not a slip of the pen.

The hand most such documents are written in has a traceable descent. Russian cursive was developed during the 18th century on the base of the earlier Cyrillic tachygraphic writing known as skoropis, the rapid or running script, which in turn was the 14th to 17th century chancery hand of the earlier Cyrillic bookhand scripts called ustav and poluustav. It became the handwritten counterpart of the civil, or Petrine, printed script of books.

One caution about added marks. The reference description of Russian cursive records that Serbian and Macedonian cursive lowercase г is written as it is in Russian but with an additional macron, while in some Russian hands a horizontal bar above a character is what marks it as т rather than ш. A bar over a letter has to be read against the tradition the document comes from before it is read as part of the letter itself.