G
G or g is the seventh letter of the ISO basic Latin alphabet. Its name in English is gee (pronounced /ˈdʒiː/), plural gees.[1]
| G | |
|---|---|
| G g | |
| (See below, Typographic) | |
 | |
| Usage | |
| Writing system | Latin script |
| Type | Alphabetic |
| Language of origin | Latin language |
| Phonetic usage | [g] [d͡ʒ] [ʒ] [ŋ] [j] [ɣ~ʝ] [x~χ] [d͡z] [ɟ] [k] [ɠ] [ɢ] /dʒiː/ |
| Unicode value | U+0047, U+0067, U+0261 |
| Alphabetical position | 7 |
| History | |
| Development | |
| Time period | ~-300 to present |
| Descendants | • ₲ • Ȝ • Ᵹ •  |
| Sisters | C Г ג ج گ ܓ ࠂ ℷ 𐡂 Գ գ |
| Transliteration equivalents | C |
| Variations | (See below, Typographic) |
| Other | |
| Other letters commonly used with | gh, g(x) |
|
History
The letter 'G' was introduced in the Old Latin period as a variant of 'C' to distinguish voiced /ɡ/ from voiceless /k/. The recorded originator of 'G' is freedman Spurius Carvilius Ruga, the first Roman to open a fee-paying school, who taught 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.[2] 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."[3] The 3rd-century-BC addition of the letter G to the Roman alphabet is credited to Spurius Carvilius Ruga.[4]
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'.[5]
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
The modern lowercase 'g' has two typographic variants: the single-storey (sometimes opentail) 'g' and the double-storey (sometimes looptail) 'g'. 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 (g) 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 ⟨
Wong et al. (2018) found that native English speakers have little conscious awareness of the looptail 'g' (
Pronunciation and use
| Most common pronunciation: /g/ | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Language | Dialect(s) | Pronunciation (IPA) | Environment | Notes |
| Afrikaans | /x/ | |||
| Arabic | Egyptian | /g/ | Latinization | |
| Standard; most dialects | /ɣ/ | Common latinization | ||
| Catalan | /(d)ʒ/ | Before e, i | ||
| /g/ | Usually | |||
| Danish | /g/ | Word-initially | ||
| /k/ | Usually | |||
| Dutch | Standard | /ɣ/ | ||
| Southern dialects | /ʝ/ | |||
| Northern dialects | /ʁ/ | |||
| English | /dʒ/ | Before e, i, y | ||
| /g/ | Usually | |||
| /ʒ/ | Before e, i, y in some words | |||
| silent | Some words, initial <gn>, and word-finally before a consonant | |||
| Faroese | /j/ | soft, lenited; see Faroese phonology | ||
| /k/ | hard | |||
| /tʃ/ | 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 | |||
| French | /g/ | Usually | ||
| /ʒ/ | Before e, i, y | |||
| Galician | /g/~/ħ/ | Usually | See Gheada for consonant variation | |
| /ʃ/ | Before e, i | now rarely spelled as such | ||
| Greek | /g/ | 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 | /g/ | Usually | ||
| /ɟ/ | After i or before e, i | |||
| Italian | /g/ | Usually | ||
| /dʒ/ | Before e, i | |||
| Mandarin | Standard | /k/ | Pinyin latinization | |
| Norman | /dʒ/ | Before e, i | ||
| /g/ | Usually | |||
| Norwegian | /g/ | Usually | ||
| /j/ | Before ei, i, j, øy, y | |||
| Portuguese | /g/ | Usually | ||
| /ʒ/ | Before e, i | |||
| Romanian | /dʒ/ | Before e, i | ||
| /g/ | Usually | |||
| Romansh | /dʑ/ | Before e, i | ||
| /g/ | Usually | |||
| Scottish Gaelic | /k/ | Usually | ||
| /kʲ/ | After i or before e, i | |||
| Spanish | All | /g/ | Usually | |
| American | /h/ | Before e, i, y | ||
| European | /x/ | Before e, i, y | ||
| Swedish | /g/ | Usually | ||
| /j/ | Before ä, e, i, ö, y | |||
| Turkish | /g/ | Usually | ||
| /ɟ/ | Before e, i, ö, ü | |||
English
In English, the letter appears either alone or in some digraphs. Alone, it represents
- a voiced velar plosive (/ɡ/ or "hard" ⟨g⟩), as in goose, gargoyle and game;
- a voiced palato-alveolar affricate (/d͡ʒ/ or "soft" ⟨g⟩), generally before ⟨i⟩ or ⟨e⟩, as in giant, ginger and geology; or
- a voiced palato-alveolar sibilant (/ʒ/) in some words of French origin, such as rouge, beige and genre.
In words of Romance origin, ⟨g⟩ is mainly soft before ⟨e⟩ (including the digraphs ⟨ae⟩ and ⟨oe⟩), ⟨i⟩, or ⟨y⟩, and hard otherwise. Soft ⟨g⟩ is also used in many words that came into English through medieval or modern Romance languages from languages without soft ⟨g⟩ (like Ancient Latin and Greek) (e.g. fragile or logic). There are many English words of non-Romance origin where ⟨g⟩ is hard though followed by ⟨e⟩ or ⟨i⟩ (e.g. get, gift), and a few in which ⟨g⟩ is soft though followed by ⟨a⟩ such as gaol or margarine.
The double consonant ⟨gg⟩ has the value /ɡ/ (hard ⟨g⟩) as in nugget, with very few exceptions: /ɡd͡ʒ/ in suggest and /d͡ʒ/ in exaggerate and veggies.
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
- Ø (no sound) as in through, neighbor, night
- /p/ in hiccough
- /x/ in ugh
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, Finnish, and Slovak 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.
In older Czech and Slovak orthographies, ⟨g⟩ was used to represent /j/, while /ɡ/ was written as ⟨ǧ⟩ (⟨g⟩ with caron).
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
- Γ γ : 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[15]
- ᵷ : Turned g
- Г г : Cyrillic letter Ge
- Ȝ ȝ : Latin letter Yogh
- Ɣ ɣ : Latin letter Gamma
- Ᵹ ᵹ : Insular g
- Ꝿ ꝿ : Turned insular g
- ɢ : Latin letter small capital G, used in the International Phonetic Alphabet to represent a voiced uvular stop
- ʛ : Latin letter small capital G with hook, used in the International Phonetic Alphabet to represent a voiced uvular implosive
- ᴳ ᵍ : Modifier letters are used in the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet[16]
- ꬶ : Used for the Teuthonista phonetic transcription system[17]
- 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
Computing codes
| Preview | G | g | ɡ | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Unicode name | LATIN CAPITAL LETTER G | LATIN SMALL LETTER G | LATIN SMALL LETTER SCRIPT G | |||
| Encodings | decimal | hex | decimal | hex | decimal | hex |
| Unicode | 71 | U+0047 | 103 | U+0067 | 609 | U+0261 |
| UTF-8 | 71 | 47 | 103 | 67 | 201 161 | C9 A1 |
| Numeric character reference | G | G | g | g | ɡ | ɡ |
| EBCDIC family | 199 | C7 | 135 | 87 | ||
| ASCII 1 | 71 | 47 | 103 | 67 | ||
- 1 Also for encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Macintosh families of encodings.
Other representations
| NATO phonetic | Morse code |
| Golf |
 |
 |
|
 |
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| Signal flag | Flag semaphore | American manual alphabet (ASL fingerspelling) | Braille dots-1245 Unified English Braille |
References
- The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. 1976.
- Encyclopaedia Romana
- 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.
- Gnanadesikan, Amalia E. (2011-09-13). The Writing Revolution: Cuneiform to the Internet. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 9781444359855.
- 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.
- Association phonétique internationale (January 1895). "vɔt syr l alfabɛ" [Votes sur l'alphabet]. Le Maître Phonétique: 16–17. JSTOR 44707535.
- Association phonétique internationale (February–March 1900). "akt ɔfisjɛl" [Acte officiel]. Le Maître Phonétique: 20. JSTOR 44701257.
- Jones, Daniel (July–December 1948). "desizjɔ̃ ofisjɛl" [Décisions officielles]. Le Maître Phonétique (90): 28–30. JSTOR 44705217.
- 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.
- 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. Reprinted in Journal of the International Phonetic Association 40 (3), December 2010, pp. 299–358, doi:10.1017/S0025100311000089.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Dean, Signe. "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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
External links
- Lewis and Short Latin Dictionary: G