G is the seventh letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled gee or occasionally ge (pronounced /dʒiː/).^[1]

Basic Latin alphabet
Aa Bb Cc Dd   Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo Pp Qq Rr Ss Tt Uu Vv   Ww Xx Yy Zz

History

The letter G was introduced in the Old Latin period as a variant of C to distinguish Latin voiced velar /ɡ/ from voiceless /k/.

The recorded originator of the letter G is freedman Spurius Carvilius Ruga, the first Roman to open a fee-paying school, who taught around 230 BC. At this time, K had fallen out of favour, and C, which had formerly expressed both /ɡ/ and /k/ before open vowels, had come to express /k/ 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 BC. 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."^[2] According to some records, the original 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.^[3]

Eventually, both velar consonants /k/ and /ɡ/ developed palatalizations and allophones before front vowels, which is why today, C and G have different sound values in the various 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. 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.

Usage

In English, the letter represents a voiced postalveolar affricate /dʒ/) ("soft G"), as in: giant, ginger, and geology; or a voiced velar plosive /ɡ/ ("hard G"), as in: goose, gargoyle, and game. In some words of French origin, the "soft G" is pronounced as a fricative (/ʒ/), 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 soft or hard regardless of position (e.g. "get"), and two (gaol, margarine) in which it is soft even before an A.

Most non-Romance languages use G to represent /ɡ/ regardless of position (however the Dutch language does not have /ɡ/ in its native words, and instead G is pronounced as a voiced velar fricative /ɣ/ (a sound that does not occur in modern English). While the soft value of G varies in different Romance languages (/ʒ/ in French, Catalan, and Portuguese, /ʤ/ in Italian and Romanian, and /x/ in Castilian Spanish and /h/ in other dialects of Spanish), in all except Romanian and Italian, 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 /ɡ/, /ɣ/, /x/, and /j/. It now has a great variety of values, including /f/ in enough, /ɡ/ in loan words like spaghetti, and as an indicator of a letter's "long" pronunciation in words like eight and night. GN, with value /n/, is also common, as in sign.

In Italian and Romanian, GH is used to represent a /ɡ/ value before front vowels where G would otherwise represent a soft value. In Italian and French, GN is used to represent the palatal nasal /ɲ/, a sound similar to the NY in canyon).

G is used an average amount in the English language. While not one of the letters that appears rarely it is also not one of the most commonly used consonants.

Codes for computing

Alternative representations of G

NATO phonetic		Morse code
Golf		––·
Signal flag	Semaphore	ASL Manual	Braille

In Unicode the capital G is codepoint U+0047 and the lowercase g is U+0067.

The ASCII code for capital G is 71 and for lowercase g is 103; or in binary 01000111 and 01100111, correspondingly.

The EBCDIC code for capital G is 199 and for lowercase g is 135.

The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "G" and "g" for upper and lower case respectively.

References

1. ^ "G" Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989); Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1993); "gee," op. cit.
2. ^ Evertype.com
3. ^ Encyclopaedia Romana

External links

• Lewis and Short Latin Dictionary: G

See also

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

G

• Ĝ and ĝ
• Ğ and ğ
• Carolingian G
• Hard and soft g
• Insular G
• Yogh