Writing System
Ga was first written by Christian Jacobsen Protten, who was the son of a Danish soldier and an African woman, in about 1764. The orthography has been revised a number of times since 1968, with the most recent review in 1990.
The writing system is a Latin-based alphabet and has 26 letters. It has three additional letter symbols which correspond to the IPA symbols. There are also eleven digraphs and two trigraphs. Vowel length is represented by doubling or tripling the vowel symbol, e.g. 'a', 'aa' and 'aaa'. Tones are not represented. Nasalisation is represented after oral consonants where it distinguishes between minimal pairs.
The Ga alphabet is: Aa, Bb, Dd, Ee, Ɛɛ, Ff, Gg, Hh, Ii, Jj, Kk, Ll, Mm, Nn, Ŋŋ, Oo, Ɔɔ, Pp, Rr, Ss, Tt, Uu, Vv, Ww, Yy, Zz
The following letters represent sounds which do not correspond with the same letter as the IPA symbol (e.g. B represents /b/):
- J j - /d͡ʒ/
- Y y - /j/
Digraphs and trigraphs:
- Gb gb - /ɡb/
- Gw gw - /ɡʷ/
- Hw hw - /hʷ/
- Jw jw - /d͡ʒʷ/
- Kp kp - /kp/
- Kw kw - /kʷ/
- Ny ny - /ɲ/
- Ŋm ŋm - /ŋm/
- Ŋw ŋw - (an allophone rather than a phoneme)
- Sh sh - /ʃ/
- Ts ts - /t͡ʃ/
- Shw shw - /ʃʷ/
- Tsw tsw - /t͡ʃʷ/
Read more about this topic: Ga Language
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