G
The letter
G is the seventh letter in the
Latin alphabet. Its name in
English is
gee (jÄ",
IPA: ).
The letter
G was created by the Romans because they felt that
C was not an adequate letter to represent both /k/
and /g/.
Hebrew gimel
| Phoenician gimel
|  | Classical Greek |
Classical Greek gamma
|  | Early Latin |
Early Latin
| Late Latin
|
The recorded originator of the letter G is
Spurius Carvilius Ruga, who taught around 230 BC:
The first derived letter of the Latin alphabet can be dated to the 3rd century BCE. Latin phonology was different again from Etruscan; while Q was used for the labiovelar , C continued to represent /k/ before /e/ and /i/ as well as in other environments (K had become unpopular and fallen out of general use in favour of C). Latin had a voiced velar , however, which also had to be represented by C. The first Roman to open a fee-paying school, a freedman named Spurius Carvilius Ruga, amended the Latin script by replacing the seventh letter,
Z, which represented the unneeded Greek sound /dz/, with a new letter, LATIN LETTER C WITH STROKE, which we have come to know as G. [...] Note that Ruga's positioning of G shows that alphabetic order was a concern even in the 3rd century BCE. Sampson (1985) suggested that: "Evidently the order of the alphabet was felt to be such a concrete thing that a new letter could be added in the middle only if a 'space' was created by the dropping of an old letter." LATIN LETTER G is a derived letter which has become a basic letter of the Latin alphabet.[
1]
According to some records, the seventh letter, Z, had been purged from the Latin alphabet somewhat earlier in the 3rd century BC by the Roman censor
Appius Claudius, who found it distasteful and foreign[
2]; thus, the issue of alphabetic order (also connected with Greek numerals) was still a concern in Spurius' day.
As the sound /k/ did, /g/ also developed
palatal and
velar allophones which is why today, G has different sound values in all Romance languages, as well as
English (due to
French influence).
The modern
minuscule (lower-case) G has two basic shapes: the "opentail G"
and the "looptail G"
. The opentail version derives from the majuscule (capital) form by raising the
serif that distinguishes it from a C to the top of the loop, thereby closing the loop, and extending the vertical stroke downward and to the left. The looptail form developed similarly, except that some ornate forms then extended the tail back to the right, and to the left again, forming a loop. The initial extension to the left was absorbed into the upper loop. The looptail version became popular when printing switched to "Roman type" because the tail was effectively shorter, making it possible to put more lines on a page. And in the looptail version, there is a tiny flick at the upper right which in typography is called its "ear."
Generally, the two minuscule forms are interchangeable, but occasionally the difference has been exploited to make a contrast. The 1949
Principles of the International Phonetic Association recommends using
for advanced
voiced velar plosives and
for regular ones where the two are contrasted, but this suggestion was never accepted by
phoneticians in general, and today
is the symbol used in the
International Phonetic Alphabet, with
acknowledged as an acceptable variant.
In English, the letter can be pronounced as a "soft G" (
IPA ), as in:
giant,
ginger,
geology, or as a "hard G" (IPA ), as in:
goose,
gargoyle,
game. In some words of French origin, as in
French generally, the "soft G" is pronounced as IPA , as in
rouge,
beige, and
genre. Generally, G is soft before E, I, and Y, and hard otherwise, but there are many English words of non-Romance origin where G is hard regardless of position, and three (
gaol, margarine, and the name
Sacagawea) in which it is soft even before an A. Some words like "judgment" have g making ) in the "wrong" place.
Most non-Romance languages pronounce G as regardless of position (however the
Dutch language does not have a /g/ sound in its native words, and instead G is pronounced , a sound that does not occur in English) while in Romance languages the soft value varies, such as in French, Catalan, and Portuguese, in Italian, and in Castillian Spanish and in other dialects of Spanish. The general rule is that soft G is pronounced the same as the J of the same language.
Several
digraphs are common in English. GH originally represented the letter
yogh which English adopted from
Old Irish, and took various values including , , , and . It now has a great variety of values, including in
enough, in loan words like
spaghetti, and silence in words like
eight and
night. GN, with value , is also common, as in
sign.
In Italian, GH is used to force a value before E and I where G would take a soft value, and GN is used for (rather like English NY in
canyon).
In Spanish, G before I or E is pronounced as the same as J. The Spanish poet
Juan Ramón Jiménez proposed to simplify the Spanish spelling by using just the versions with
j. The rest of Spanish speakers did not follow him, but his works, and the translations of
Rabindranath Tagore made by Jiménez's wife
Zenobia CamprubÃ, are published in his spelling.
*
Äœ and Ä*
Äž and ÄŸ*
Carolingian G*
Insular G
