Is there any good source on the topic of "г" pronounced as "h" instead of "g"? I've studied Russian as a second language and once got into an argument over whether Russian has the equivalent of "h" because "x" is pronounced as "kh", which is harder than "h". Does this phenomenon have some name, as googling didn't turn out much?
It's hard to describe in writing, but I'll try. There's no "h" sound, like the one where you just exhale, neither in Russian nor Ukrainian. The Russian "г" is hard, like "g" in "get". The Ukrainian equivalent to that is "ґ", but their "г" is something in between, closer to "kh". The fact that many English-language reports about the war do transliterate "г" as "h" in Ukrainian toponyms doesn't help, but it's as close as one could reasonably get to the real Ukrainian pronunciation.
There's so much no such sound that I've seen Hebrew and Arabic transcribed into Russian with the character "h" for that sound.
> Does this phenomenon have some name, as googling didn't turn out much?
Certainly not a formal one. Хэканье? Or maybe simply украинский акцент?
The Ukrainian г is a voiced glottal fricative, IPA /ɦ/. This is as the English /h/ sound but voiced. Southern Russian dialects use /ɣ/, a voiced velar fricative, which is pronounced like /ɦ/ but further forward in the throat. East Slavic dialects turn Proto-Slavic /ɡ/ more into /ɦ/ the further south you go.
It should be noted that even in Russian, /ɣ/ used to be the more common pronunciation throughout the Empire until the end of the 19th century or so, due to the influence of Church Slavonic (in which it is also /ɣ/). And it's still preserved in modern standard Russian in some words, such as бог (god) - /boɣ/.
