G

G, or g, is the seventh letter in 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 (pronounced /ˈ/), plural gees.[1]

G
G g
Usage
Writing systemLatin script
TypeAlphabetic
Language of originLatin language
Phonetic usage
Unicode codepointU+0047, U+0067, U+0261
Alphabetical position7
History
Development
Pictogram of a Camel (speculated origin)
Time period~-300 to present
Descendants
Sisters
Transliteration equivalentsC
Other
Other letters commonly used withgh, g(x)
Writing directionLeft-to-Right

History

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."[2] Over time, however, the letter C shifted to represent the unvoiced 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.[2]

Afterwards, the letter 'G' was introduced in the Old Latin period as a variant of 'C' to distinguish voiced /ɡ/ from voiceless /k/, and G was used to represent a voiced velar from this point on and C "stood for the unvoiced velar only".[2]

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 BC:[3] 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 /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. 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.[4] Sampson (1985) 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."[5]

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 /k/ > /ɡ/ was due to contamination from the also similar-looking 'K'.[6]

Eventually, both velar consonants /k/ and /ɡ/ developed palatalized allophones before front vowels; consequently in today's Romance languages, c and g have different sound values depending on context (known as hard and soft C and hard and soft G). Because of French influence, English language orthography shares this feature.

Typographic variants

Typographic variants include a double-storey and single-storey g.

The modern lowercase 'g' has two typographic variants: the single-storey (sometimes "opentail") '' and the double-storey (sometimes "looptail") ''. The single-storey form derives from the majuscule (uppercase) form by raising the serif that distinguishes it from 'c' to the top of the loop (thus closing 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. The initial extension to the left was absorbed into the upper closed bowl. The double-storey 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 double-storey version, a small top stroke in the upper-right, often terminating in an orb shape, is called an "ear".

Generally, the two forms are complementary, but occasionally the difference has been exploited to provide contrast. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, opentail ɡ has always represented a voiced velar plosive, while was distinguished from ɡ and represented a voiced velar fricative from 1895 to 1900.[7][8] In 1948, the Council of the International Phonetic Association recognized ɡ and as typographic equivalents,[9] and this decision was reaffirmed in 1993.[10] While the 1949 Principles of the International Phonetic Association recommended the use of for a velar plosive and ɡ for an advanced one for languages where it is preferable to distinguish the two, such as Russian,[11] this practice never caught on.[12] The 1999 Handbook of the International Phonetic Association, the successor to the Principles, abandoned the recommendation and acknowledged both shapes as acceptable variants.[13]

Wong et al. (2018) found that native English speakers have little conscious awareness of the looptail form ().[14][15] They 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."

In Unicode, the two appearances are generally treated as glyph variants with no semantic difference. Most serif typefaces use the looptail form (for example, g) and most sans-serif typefaces use the opentail form (for example, g) but the code point in both cases is U+0067. For applications where the single-storey variant must be distinguished (such as strict IPA in a typeface where the usual g character is double-storey), the character U+0261 ɡ LATIN SMALL LETTER SCRIPT G is available, as well as an upper case version, U+A7AC LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SCRIPT G.

Pronunciation and use

Pronunciations of Gg
Language Dialect(s) Pronunciation (IPA) Environment Notes
Afrikaans /x/
Arabic /ɡ/ Latinization; corresponding to ق or ج in Arabic
Azeri /ɟ/
Catalan /(d)ʒ/ Before e, i
/ɡ/ Usually
Danish /ɡ/ Word-initially
/k/ Usually
Dutch Standard /ɣ/
Southern dialects /ɣ̟/
Northern dialects /χ/
English // Before e, i, y (see exceptions below)
/ɡ/ Usually
/ʒ/ Before e, i in "modern" loanwords from French
silent Some words, initial <gn>, and word-finally before a consonant
Esperanto /ɡ/
Faroese /j/ soft, lenited; see Faroese phonology
/k/ hard
// soft
/v/ after a, æ, á, e, o, ø and before u
/w/ after ó, u, ú and before a, i, or u
silent after a, æ, á, e, o, ø and before a
Fijian /ŋ/
French /ɡ/ Usually
/ʒ/ Before e, i, y
Galician /ɡ/~/ħ/ Usually See Gheada for consonant variation
/ʃ/ Before e, i obsolete spelling, replaced by the letter x
Greek /ɡ/ Usually Latinization
/ɟ/ Before ai, e, i, oi, y Latinization
Icelandic /c/ soft
/k/ hard
/ɣ/ hard, lenited; see Icelandic phonology
/j/ soft, lenited
Irish /ɡ/ Usually
/ɟ/ After i or before e, i
Italian /ɡ/ Usually
// Before e, i
Malay /g/
Mandarin Standard /k/ Pinyin latinization
Norman // Before e, i
/ɡ/ Usually
Norwegian /ɡ/ Usually
/j/ Before ei, i, j, øy, y
Portuguese /ɡ/ Usually
/ʒ/ Before e, i, y
Romanian // Before e, i
/ɡ/ Usually
Romansh // Before e, i
/ɡ/ Usually
Samoan /ŋ/
Scottish Gaelic /k/ Usually
// After i or before e, i
Spanish /ɡ/ Usually
/x/ or /h/ Before e, i, y Variation between velar and glottal realizations depends on dialect
Swedish /ɡ/ Usually
/j/ Before ä, e, i, ö, y
Turkish /ɡ/ Usually
/ɟ/ Before e, i, ö, ü
Vietnamese Standard /ɣ/
Northern /z/ Before i
Southern /j/ Before i

English

In English, the letter appears either alone or in some digraphs. Alone, it represents

g is predominantly soft before e (including the digraphs ae and oe), i, or y, and hard otherwise. It is hard in those derivations from γυνή (gynḗ) meaning woman where initial-worded as such. Soft g 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 (such as fragile, logic or magic). There remain widely used a few English words of non-Romance origin where g is hard followed by e or i (get, give, gift), and very few in which g is soft though followed by a such as gaol, which since the 20th century is almost always written as "jail".

The double consonant gg has the value /ɡ/ (hard g) as in nugget, with very few exceptions: /d͡ʒ/ in exaggerate and veggies and dialectally /ɡd͡ʒ/ in suggest.

The digraph dg has the value /d͡ʒ/ (soft g), as in badger. Non-digraph dg can also occur, in compounds like floodgate and headgear.

The digraph ng may represent:

  • a velar nasal (/ŋ/) as in length, singer
  • the latter followed by hard g (/ŋɡ/) as in jungle, finger, longest

Non-digraph ng also occurs, with possible values

  • /nɡ/ as in engulf, ungainly
  • /nd͡ʒ/ as in sponge, angel
  • /nʒ/ as in melange

The digraph gh (in many cases a replacement for the obsolete letter yogh, which took various values including /ɡ/, /ɣ/, /x/ and /j/) may represent:

  • /ɡ/ as in ghost, aghast, burgher, spaghetti
  • /f/ as in cough, laugh, roughage
  • ∅ (no sound) as in through, neighbor, night
  • /x/ in ugh
  • (rarely) /p/ in hiccough
  • (rarely) /k/ in s'ghetti

Non-digraph gh also occurs, in compounds like foghorn, pigheaded.

The digraph gn may represent:

  • /n/ as in gnostic, deign, foreigner, signage
  • /nj/ in loanwords like champignon, lasagna

Non-digraph gn also occurs, as in signature, agnostic.

The trigraph ngh has the value /ŋ/ as in gingham or dinghy. Non-trigraph ngh also occurs, in compounds like stronghold and dunghill.

G is the tenth least frequently used letter in the English language (after Y, P, B, V, K, J, X, Q, and Z), with a frequency of about 2.02% in words.

Other languages

Most Romance languages and some Nordic languages also have two main pronunciations for g, hard and soft. While the soft value of g varies in different Romance languages (/ʒ/ in French and Portuguese, [(d)ʒ] in Catalan, /d͡ʒ/ in Italian and Romanian, and /x/ in most dialects of Spanish), in all except Romanian and Italian, soft g has the same pronunciation as the j.

In Italian and Romanian, gh is used to represent /ɡ/ 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 somewhat similar to the ny in English canyon. In Italian, the trigraph gli, when appearing before a vowel or as the article and pronoun gli, represents the palatal lateral approximant /ʎ/.

Other languages typically use g to represent /ɡ/ regardless of position.

Amongst European languages, Czech, Dutch, Estonian and Finnish are an exception as they do not have /ɡ/ in their native words. In Dutch, g represents a voiced velar fricative /ɣ/ instead, a sound that does not occur in modern English, but there is a dialectal variation: many Netherlandic dialects use a voiceless fricative ([x] or [χ]) instead, and in southern dialects it may be palatal [ʝ]. 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 (like Amelands) may have a phonemic /ɡ/.

Faroese uses g to represent /dʒ/, in addition to /ɡ/, and also uses it to indicate a glide.

In Māori, g is used in the digraph ng which represents the velar nasal /ŋ/ and is pronounced like the ng in singer.

The Samoan and Fijian languages use the letter g by itself for /ŋ/.

In older Czech and Slovak orthographies, g was used to represent /j/, while /ɡ/ was written as ǧ (g with caron).

The Azerbaijani Latin alphabet uses g exclusively for the "soft" sound, namely /ɟ/. The sound /ɡ/ is written as q. This leads to unusual spellings of loanwords: qram 'gram', qrup 'group', qaraj 'garage', qallium 'gallium'.

Ancestors, descendants and siblings

Ligatures and abbreviations

Computing codes

Character information
PreviewGgɡ
Unicode name LATIN CAPITAL LETTER G LATIN SMALL LETTER G LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SCRIPT G LATIN SMALL LETTER SCRIPT G
Encodingsdecimalhexdechexdechexdechex
Unicode71U+0047103U+006742924U+A7AC609U+0261
UTF-8714710367234 158 172EA 9E AC201 161C9 A1
Numeric character reference&#71;&#x47;&#103;&#x67;&#42924;&#xA7AC;&#609;&#x261;
EBCDIC family199C713587
ASCII 1714710367
1 Also for encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Macintosh families of encodings.

Other representations

See also

References

  1. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. 1976.
  2. Ray, Michael; Gaur, Aakanksha (2022-04-27). "G". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 2023-05-08.
  3. Gnanadesikan, Amalia E. (2011-09-13). The Writing Revolution: Cuneiform to the Internet. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 9781444359855.
  4. Encyclopaedia Romana
  5. Everson, Michael; Sigurðsson, Baldur; Málstöð, Íslensk. "Sorting the letter ÞORN". Evertype. ISO CEN/TC304. Archived from the original on 2018-09-24. Retrieved 2018-11-01.
  6. Hempl, George (1899). "The Origin of the Latin Letters G and Z". Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association. The Johns Hopkins University Press. 30: 24–41. doi:10.2307/282560. JSTOR 282560.
  7. Association phonétique internationale (January 1895). "vɔt syr l alfabɛ" [Votes sur l'alphabet]. Le Maître Phonétique. 10 (1): 16–17. JSTOR 44707535.
  8. Association phonétique internationale (February–March 1900). "akt ɔfisjɛl" [Acte officiel]. Le Maître Phonétique. 15 (2/3): 20. JSTOR 44701257.
  9. Jones, Daniel (July–December 1948). "desizjɔ̃ ofisjɛl" [Décisions officielles]. Le Maître Phonétique. 26 (63) (90): 28–30. JSTOR 44705217.
  10. International Phonetic Association (1993). "Council actions on revisions of the IPA". Journal of the International Phonetic Association. 23 (1): 32–34. doi:10.1017/S002510030000476X. S2CID 249420050.
  11. International Phonetic Association (1949). The Principles of the International Phonetic Association. Department of Phonetics, University College, London. Supplement to Le Maître Phonétique 91, January–June 1949. JSTOR i40200179.
  12. Wells, John C. (6 November 2006). "Scenes from IPA history". John Wells's phonetic blog. Department of Phonetics and Linguistics, University College London. Archived from the original on 13 June 2018. Retrieved 29 March 2018.
  13. International Phonetic Association (1999). Handbook of the International Phonetic Association: A Guide to the Use of the International Phonetic Alphabet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 19. ISBN 0-521-63751-1.
  14. Wong, Kimberly; Wadee, Frempongma; Ellenblum, Gali; McCloskey, Michael (2 April 2018). "The Devil's in the g-tails: Deficient letter-shape knowledge and awareness despite massive visual experience". Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance. 44 (9): 1324–1335. doi:10.1037/xhp0000532. PMID 29608074. S2CID 4571477.
  15. Dean, Signe (4 April 2018). "Most People Don't Know What Lowercase 'G' Looks Like And We're Not Even Kidding". Science Alert. Archived from the original on 8 April 2018. Retrieved 7 April 2018.
  16. Constable, Peter (2004-04-19). "L2/04-132 Proposal to add additional phonetic characters to the UCS" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on 2017-10-11. Retrieved 2018-03-24.
  17. Miller, Kirk; Ball, Martin (2020-07-11). "L2/20-116R: Expansion of the extIPA and VoQS" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on 2020-10-24.
  18. Anderson, Deborah (2020-12-07). "L2/21-021: Reference doc numbers for L2/20-266R "Consolidated code chart of proposed phonetic characters" and IPA etc. code point and name changes" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on 2021-01-08.
  19. Everson, Michael; West, Andrew (2020-10-05). "L2/20-268: Revised proposal to add ten characters for Middle English to the UCS" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on 2020-10-24.
  20. Miller, Kirk; Ashby, Michael (2020-11-08). "L2/20-252R: Unicode request for IPA modifier-letters (a), pulmonic" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on 2021-07-30.
  21. Everson, Michael; et al. (2002-03-20). "L2/02-141: Uralic Phonetic Alphabet characters for the UCS" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on 2018-02-19. Retrieved 2018-03-24.
  22. Everson, Michael; Dicklberger, Alois; Pentzlin, Karl; Wandl-Vogt, Eveline (2011-06-02). "L2/11-202: Revised proposal to encode "Teuthonista" phonetic characters in the UCS" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on 2017-10-11. Retrieved 2018-03-24.
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