G


G, or g, is the seventh letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the [English alphabet|modern English alphabet], the alphabets of other western European languages, and others worldwide. Its name in English is gee, plural gees.
The lowercase version can be written in two forms: the single-storey ' and the double-storey '. The former is commonly used in handwriting and typefaces based on it, especially in texts intended to be read by children; it is the style used by most sans-serif typefaces, such as Helvetica. The latter form is used by most serif typefaces, such as Times.

History

EgyptianPhoenician
gaml		Western Greek
Gamma		Etruscan
C		Old Latin
C		Latin
G

The evolution of the Latin alphabet's G can be traced back to the Latin alphabet's predecessor, the Greek alphabet. The voiced velar stop was represented by the third letter of the Greek alphabet, gamma (Γ), which was later adopted by the Etruscan language. Latin then borrowed this "rounded form" of gamma, C, to represent the same sound in words such as recei, which was likely an early dative form of rex, meaning "king", as found in an "early Latin inscription." Over time, however, the letter C shifted to represent the voiceless velar stop, leading to the displacement of the letter K. Scholars believe that this change can be attributed to the influence of the Etruscan language on Latin.
Afterwards, the letter 'G' was introduced in the Old Latin period as a variant of 'C' to distinguish voiced from voiceless, and G was used to represent a voiced velar stop from this point on and C "stood for the unvoiced velar only".
The recorded originator of 'G' is freedman Spurius Carvilius Ruga, who added letter G to the teaching of the Roman alphabet during the 3rd century BCE: he was the first Roman to open a fee-paying school, around 230 BCE. At this time, 'K' had fallen out of favor, and 'C', which had formerly represented both and before open vowels, had come to express in all environments.
Ruga's positioning of 'G' shows that alphabetic order related to the letters' values as Greek numerals was a concern even in the 3rd century BCE. According to some records, the original seventh letter, 'Z', had been purged from the Latin alphabet somewhat earlier in the 3rd century BCE by the Roman censor Appius Claudius, who found it distasteful and foreign. Sampson suggests 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."
George Hempl proposed in 1899 that there never was such a "space" in the alphabet and that in fact 'G' was a direct descendant of zeta. Zeta took shapes like ⊏ in some of the Old Italic scripts; the development of the monumental form 'G' from this shape would be exactly parallel to the development of 'C' from gamma. He suggests that the pronunciation > was due to contamination from the also similar-looking 'K'.
Eventually, both velar consonants and developed palatalized allophones before front vowels; consequently in today's Romance languages, and have different sound values depending on context. Because of French influence, English language orthography shares this feature.

Typographic variants

The modern lowercase has two typographic variants: the single-storey and the double-storey . The single-storey form derives from the majuscule form by raising the serif that distinguishes it from 'c' to the top of the loop, and extending the vertical stroke downward and to the left. The double-storey form had developed similarly, except that some ornate forms then extended the tail back to the right, and to the left again, forming a closed bowl or loop. In the double-storey version, a small top stroke in the upper-right, often terminating in an orb shape, is called an "ear". The loop-tail form is the original one, as seen in 9th century Carolingian script; evolving over centuries of monastic copying, the open-tail variant came to predominate and it was this that Gutenberg adopted when creating the first Blackletter typefaces until that in turn was replaced by Humanist minuscule, which reasserted the closed-tail form.
Generally, the two forms are complementary and interchangeable; the form displayed is a typeface selection choice. In Unicode, the two appearances are generally treated as glyph variants with no semantic difference. Most serif typefaces use the looptail form and most sans-serif typefaces use the opentail form but the code point in both cases is U+0067. For applications where the single-storey variant must be distinguished, the character is available, as well as an upper case version,.
Occasionally the difference has been exploited to provide contrast. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, opentail has always represented a voiced velar plosive, while looptail represented a voiced velar fricative from 1895 to 1900. In 1948, the Council of the International Phonetic Association recognized and as typographic equivalents, and this decision was reaffirmed in 1993. While the 1949 Principles of the International Phonetic Association recommended the use of for a velar plosive and for an advanced one for languages where it is preferable to distinguish the two, such as Russian, this practice never caught on. The 1999 Handbook of the International Phonetic Association, the successor to the Principles, abandoned the recommendation and acknowledged both shapes as acceptable variants.
In 2018, a study found that native English speakers have little conscious awareness of the looptail form The authors write: "Despite being questioned repeatedly, and despite being informed directly that G has two lowercase print forms, nearly half of the participants failed to reveal any knowledge of the looptail 'g', and only 1 of the 38 participants was able to write looptail 'g' correctly".

Use in writing systems

OrthographyPhonemesEnvironment
Afrikaans
Arabic romanizationA dialectal sound not found in Standard Arabic. However, the digraph gh is used to romanize the Standard Arabic sound.
Azeri
CatalanExcept before e, i
Catalan/ʒ/Before e, i
DanishExcept word-initially
DanishWord-initially
Dutch or
EnglishAny
EnglishBefore e, i, y
EnglishBefore e, i in more recent loanwords from French
EnglishsilentSome words, initial , and word-finally before a consonant
Esperanto
Faroesesoft, lenited; see Faroese phonology
Faroesehard
Faroesesoft
Faroeseafter a, æ, á, e, o, ø and before u
Faroeseafter ó, u, ú and before a, i, or u
Faroesesilentafter a, æ, á, e, o, ø and before a
Fijian
FrenchExcept before e, i, y
FrenchBefore e, i, y
Galician ~ Except before e, i, see Gheada for consonant variation
GalicianBefore e, i, obsolete, replaced by
Greek romanizationAncient Greek
Greek romanizationModern Greek except before ai, e, i, oi, y
Greek romanizationModern Greek before ai, e, i, oi, y
Icelandicsoft
Icelandichard
Icelandichard, lenited; see Icelandic phonology
Icelandicsoft, lenited
IrishExcept after i or before e, i
IrishAfter i or before e, i
ItalianExcept before e, i
ItalianBefore e, i
Malay
NormanExcept before e, i
NormanBefore e, i
NorwegianExcept before ei, i, j, øy, y
NorwegianBefore ei, i, j, øy, y
PortugueseExcept before e, i, y
PortugueseBefore e, i, y
RomanianExcept before e, i
RomanianBefore e, i
RomanshExcept before e, i
RomanshBefore e, i
Samoan
Scottish GaelicExcept after i or before e, i
Scottish GaelicAfter i or before e, i
SpanishExcept before e, i, y
Spanish ~ Before e, i, y
SwedishExcept before ä, e, i, ö, y
SwedishBefore ä, e, i, ö, y
TurkishExcept before e, i, ö, ü
TurkishBefore e, i, ö, ü
Vietnamese
Vietnamese/z/ ~ /j/Before i

English

In English, the letter appears either alone or in some digraphs. Alone, it represents
is predominantly soft before ,, or, and hard otherwise. It is hard in those derivations from γυνή meaning woman where initial-worded as such. Soft is also used in many words that came into English from medieval church/academic use, French, Spanish, Italian or Portuguese - these tend to, in other ways in English, closely align to their Ancient Latin and Greek roots.
There remain widely used a few English words of non-Romance origin where is hard followed by or , and very few in which is soft though followed by such as gaol, which since the 20th century is almost always written as "jail". The word fungi, although from Romance origin, is pronounced with a hard.
The double consonant has the value as in nugget, with very few exceptions: in exaggerate and veggies and dialectally in suggest.
The digraph has the value , as in badger. Non-digraph can also occur, in compounds like floodgate and headgear.
The digraph may represent:
  • a velar nasal as in length, singer
  • the latter followed by hard as in jungle, finger, longest
Non-digraph also occurs, with possible values
  • as in engulf, ungainly
  • as in sponge, angel
  • as in melange
The digraph may represent:
  • as in ghost, aghast, burgher, spaghetti
  • as in cough, laugh, roughage
  • ∅ as in through, neighbor, night
  • in ugh
  • in hiccough
  • in s'ghetti
Non-digraph also occurs, in compounds like foghorn, pigheaded.
The digraph may represent:
  • as in gnostic, deign, foreigner, signage
  • in loanwords like champignon, lasagna
Non-digraph also occurs, as in signature, agnostic.
The trigraph has the value as in gingham or dinghy. Non-trigraph also occurs, in compounds like stronghold and dunghill.
G is the tenth least frequently used letter in the English language, with a frequency of about 2.02% in words.

Other languages

Most Romance languages and some Scandinavian languages also have two main pronunciations for, hard and soft. While the soft value of varies in different Romance languages, in all except Romanian and Italian, soft has the same pronunciation as the.
In Italian and Romanian, is used to represent before front vowels where would otherwise represent a soft value. In Italian and French, is used to represent the palatal nasal, a sound somewhat similar to the in English canyon. In Italian, the trigraph, when appearing before a vowel or as the article and pronoun gli, represents the palatal lateral approximant. Other languages typically use to represent, regardless of position.
Amongst European languages, Czech, Dutch, Estonian and Finnish are exceptions, as they do not have in their native words. In Dutch, represents a voiced velar fricative instead, a sound that does not occur in modern English, but there is a dialectal variation: many Netherlandic dialects use a voiceless fricative instead, and in southern dialects it may be palatal. Nevertheless, word-finally, it is always voiceless in all dialects, including the standard Dutch of Belgium and the Netherlands. On the other hand, some dialects may have a phonemic.
Faroese uses to represent, in addition to, and also uses it to indicate a glide.
In Māori, is used in the digraph which represents the velar nasal and is pronounced like the in singer.
The Samoan and Fijian languages use the letter by itself for.
In older Czech and Slovak orthographies, was used to represent, while was written as .
The Azerbaijani Latin alphabet uses exclusively for the "soft" sound, namely. The sound is written as. This leads to unusual spellings of loanwords: qram 'gram', qrup 'group', qaraj 'garage', qallium 'gallium'.

Other systems

In the International Phonetic Alphabet, represents the voiced velar plosive. The small caps represents the voiced uvular plosive.

Other uses

  • Unit prefix G, meaning 1,000,000,000 times.

    Related characters

Ancestors, descendants and siblings

Computing

The principal forms of the letter have codepoints in Unicode as listed below. The ASCII codes for G and g are the same as the Unicode codepoints:
In addition, there are many forms of 'G with a diacritic', encoded either as a precomposed character or using a combining diacritic.

Other