G
G, or g, is the seventh letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the 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
| Egyptian | Phoenician 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, 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
| Orthography | Phonemes | Environment |
| Afrikaans | ||
| Arabic romanization | A dialectal sound not found in Standard Arabic. However, the digraph gh is used to romanize the Standard Arabic sound. | |
| Azeri | ||
| Catalan | Except before e, i | |
| Catalan | /ʒ/ | Before e, i |
| Danish | Except word-initially | |
| Danish | Word-initially | |
| Dutch | or | |
| English | Any | |
| English | Before e, i, y | |
| English | Before e, i in more recent loanwords from French | |
| English | silent | Some words, initial |
| Esperanto | ||
| Faroese | soft, lenited; see Faroese phonology | |
| Faroese | hard | |
| Faroese | soft | |
| Faroese | after a, æ, á, e, o, ø and before u | |
| Faroese | after ó, u, ú and before a, i, or u | |
| Faroese | silent | after a, æ, á, e, o, ø and before a |
| Fijian | ||
| French | Except before e, i, y | |
| French | Before e, i, y | |
| Galician | ~ | Except before e, i, see Gheada for consonant variation |
| Galician | Before e, i, obsolete, replaced by | |
| Greek romanization | Ancient Greek | |
| Greek romanization | Modern Greek except before ai, e, i, oi, y | |
| Greek romanization | Modern Greek before ai, e, i, oi, y | |
| Icelandic | soft | |
| Icelandic | hard | |
| Icelandic | hard, lenited; see Icelandic phonology | |
| Icelandic | soft, lenited | |
| Irish | Except after i or before e, i | |
| Irish | After i or before e, i | |
| Italian | Except before e, i | |
| Italian | Before e, i | |
| Malay | ||
| Norman | Except before e, i | |
| Norman | Before e, i | |
| Norwegian | Except before ei, i, j, øy, y | |
| Norwegian | Before ei, i, j, øy, y | |
| Portuguese | Except before e, i, y | |
| Portuguese | Before e, i, y | |
| Romanian | Except before e, i | |
| Romanian | Before e, i | |
| Romansh | Except before e, i | |
| Romansh | Before e, i | |
| Samoan | ||
| Scottish Gaelic | Except after i or before e, i | |
| Scottish Gaelic | After i or before e, i | |
| Spanish | Except before e, i, y | |
| Spanish | ~ | Before e, i, y |
| Swedish | Except before ä, e, i, ö, y | |
| Swedish | Before ä, e, i, ö, y | |
| Turkish | Except before e, i, ö, ü | |
| Turkish | Before e, i, ö, ü | |
| Vietnamese | ||
| Vietnamese | /z/ ~ /j/ | Before i |