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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 ), plural ''gees''.

History

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

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: 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 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. 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."

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 (known as hard and soft C and hard and soft G). Because of French influence, English language orthography shares this feature.

Typographic variants

The modern lowercase 'g' has two typographic variants: the single-storey (sometimes ''opentail'') 'g' 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 has always represented a voiced velar plosive, while was distinguished from and 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.

Wong et al. (2018) found that native English speakers have little conscious awareness of the looptail 'g' 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. 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 is available, as well as an upper case version, .

Pronunciation and use

English

In English, the letter appears either alone or in some digraphs. Alone, it represents
* a voiced velar plosive ( or "hard" ), as in ''goose'', ''gargoyle'', and ''game'';
* a voiced palato-alveolar affricate ( or "soft" ), predominates before or , as in ''giant'', ''ginger'', and ''geology''; or
* a voiced palato-alveolar sibilant () in post-medieval loanwords from French, such as ''rouge'', ''beige'', ''genre'' (often), and ''margarine'' (rarely)

is predominantly soft before (including the digraphs and ), , or , and hard otherwise. It is hard in those derivations from '' γυνή (gynḗ)'' 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 (such as '' fragile'', '' logic'' or '' magic'').
There remain widely used a few English words of non-Romance origin where is hard followed by or (''get'', ''give'', ''gift''), 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 double consonant has the value (hard ) as in ''nugget'', with very few exceptions: in ''exaggerate'' and ''veggies'' and dialectally in ''suggest''.

The digraph has the value (soft ), 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 (in many cases a replacement for the obsolete letter yogh, which took various values including , , and ) may represent:
* as in ''ghost'', ''aghast'', ''burgher'', ''spaghetti''
* as in ''cough'', ''laugh'', ''roughage''
* Ø (no sound) as in ''through'', ''neighbor'', ''night''
* in ''ugh''
* (rarely) in ''hiccough''
* (rarely) 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 (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 , hard and soft. While the soft value of varies in different Romance languages ( in French and Portuguese, in Catalan, in Italian and Romanian, and in most dialects of Spanish), 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, Finnish, and Slovak are an exception 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 ( or ) 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 (like Amelands) 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 ( with caron).

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'.

Related characters

Ancestors, descendants and siblings

* 𐤂 : Semitic letter Gimel, from which the following symbols originally derive
* C c : Latin letter C, from which G derives
* : Greek letter Gamma, from which C derives in turn
* ɡ : Latin letter script small G
* ᶢ : Modifier letter small script g is used for phonetic transcription
* 𝼁 : Latin small letter reversed script g, an extension to IPA for disordered speech (extIPA)
* ᵷ : Turned g
* 𝼂 : Latin letter small capital turned g, an extension to IPA for disordered speech (extIPA)
* Г г : Cyrillic letter Ge
* Ȝ ȝ : Latin letter Yogh
* Ɣ ɣ : Latin letter Gamma
* Ᵹ ᵹ : Insular g
* ᫌ : Combining insular g, used in the Ormulum
* Ꝿ ꝿ : Turned insular g
* Ꟑ ꟑ : Closed insular g, used in the Ormulum
* ɢ : Latin letter small capital G, used in the International Phonetic Alphabet to represent a voiced uvular stop
* 𐞒 : Modifier letter small capital G, used as a superscript IPA letter
* ʛ : Latin letter small capital G with hook, used in the International Phonetic Alphabet to represent a voiced uvular implosive
* 𐞔 : Modifier letter small capital G with hook, used as a superscript IPA letter
* 𐞓 : Modifier letter small g with hook, used as a superscript IPA letter
* ᴳ ᵍ : Modifier letters are used in the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet
* ꬶ : Used for the Teuthonista phonetic transcription system
* G with diacritics: Ǵ ǵ Ǥ ǥ Ĝ ĝ Ǧ ǧ Ğ ğ Ģ ģ Ɠ ɠ Ġ ġ Ḡ ḡ Ꞡ ꞡ ᶃ
*ց : Armenian alphabet Tso

Ligatures and abbreviations

* ₲ : Paraguayan guaraní

Computing codes

: ¹

Other representations

See also

* Carolingian G
* Hard and soft G
*

References

External links

*
*
*

Lewis and Short ''Latin Dictionary'': G
{{Latin script, G}

ISO basic Latin letters