From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is about the letter of the alphabet. For other uses, see G (disambi
guation).
For technical reasons, "G#" redirects here. For G-sharp, see G? (disambiguation)
.
G
ISO 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
v
t
e
G cursiva.gif
G (named gee /'d?i?/)[1] is the seventh letter in the ISO basic Latin alphabet.
Contents
1 History
1.1 Typographic variants
2 Use
3 Equivalent letters in other scripts
4 Related letters and other similar characters
5 Computing codes
6 Other representations
7 See also
8 References
9 External links
History
The letter 'G' was introduced in the Old Latin period as a variant of 'C' to dis
tinguish voiced /g/ from voiceless /k/. The recorded originator of 'G' is freedm
an Spurius Carvilius Ruga, the first Roman to open a fee-paying school, who taug
ht around 230 BC. At this time, 'K' had fallen out of favor, and 'C', which had
formerly represented both /g/ 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' va
lues as Greek numerals was a concern even in the 3rd century BC. Sampson (1985)
suggests that: "Evidently the order of the alphabet was felt to be such a concre
te thing that a new letter could be added in the middle only if a 'space' was cr
eated by the dropping of an old letter."[2] According to some records, the origi
nal seventh letter, 'Z', had been purged from the Latin alphabet somewhat earlie
r in the 3rd century BC by the Roman censor Appius Claudius, who found it distas
teful and foreign.[3]
Eventually, both velar consonants /k/ and /g/ developed palatalized allophones b
efore front vowels; consequently in today's Romance languages, 'c' and 'g' have
different sound values depending on context. Because of French influence, Englis
h 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 (someti
mes opentail) 'Opentail g.svg' and the double-story (sometimes looptail) 'Loopta
il g.svg'. 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 c
losing the loop, and extending the vertical stroke downward and to the left. The
double-story form (g) had developed similarly, except that some ornate forms th
en extended the tail back to the right, and to the left again, forming a closed
bowl or loop. The initial extension to the right was absorbed into the upper clo
sed bowl. The double-story version became popular when printing switched to "Rom
an type" because the tail was effectively shorter, making it possible to put mor
e lines on a page. In the double-story version, a small top stroke in the upperright, 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. The 1949 Principles of the International Pho
netic Association recommends using Opentail g.svg for advanced voiced velar plos
ives (denoted by Latin small letter script G) and Looptail g.svg for regular one
s where the two are contrasted, but this suggestion was never accepted by phonet
icians in general,[citation needed] and today 'Opentail g.svg' is the symbol use
d in the International Phonetic Alphabet, with 'Looptail g.svg' acknowledged as
an acceptable variant and more often used in printed materials.[citation needed]
Use
In English, the letter appears either alone or in some digraphs. Alone, it repre
sents
a voiced velar plosive (/g/ or "hard G"), as in goose, gargoyle and game;
a voiced palato-alveolar affricate (/d?/ or "soft G"), generally before 'i'
or 'e', as in giant, ginger and geology or
a voiced palato-alveolar sibilant (/?/) 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 digraph
s ae and oe), 'i', and 'y' and hard otherwise. There are many English words of n
on-Romance origin where 'g' is hard though followed by 'e' or 'i' (e.g. get, gif
t), and a few in which 'g' is soft though followed by 'a' such as gaol, margarin
e, and an alternative pronunciation of vegan.
The digraph 'dg' represents
a voiced palato-alveolar affricate (/d?/) as in bridge or judge.
The digraph 'ng' represents either
a
a
nger,
a

velar nasal (/?/) as in length and sing, or

consonant cluster of the latter with the hard G (/?g/) as in jungle and fi
or
consonant cluster of /nd?/, as in sponge or binge.

The digraph 'gh' (which mostly came about when the letter yogh, which took vario
us values including /g/, /?/, /x/ and /j/, was removed from the alphabet) now re
presents a great variety of values, including
/g/ word-initially and in loan words like spaghetti
as an indicator of a letter's "long" pronunciation in words like sigh and ni
ght
silent as in eight and plough
/f/ in enough

between two vowels, a simple cluster of /gh/ as in pigheaded

The digraph 'gn' may represent
initially, /n/ as in gnome and gnostic
finally, /n/ with a preceding "long" vowel as in sign
between two vowels, a simple cluster of /gn/ as in signature
/nj/ in loanwords such as lasagna
While the soft value of 'g' varies in different Romance languages (/?/ in French
and Portuguese, [(d)?] in Catalan, /d??/ in Italian and Romanian, and /x/ in so
me Spanish dialects, and /h/ in other dialects), in all except Romanian and Ital
ian, soft 'g' has the same pronunciation as the 'j'.
In Italian and Romanian, 'gh' is used to represent /g/ before front vowels where
'g' would otherwise represent a soft value. In Italian and French, 'gn' is used
to represent the palatal nasal /?/, a sound somewhat similar to the 'ny' in Eng
lish canyon. In Italian, the trigraph 'gli', when appearing before a vowel, repr
esents the palatal lateral approximant /?/; in the definite article and pronoun
gli /?i/, the digraph 'gl' represents the same sound.
Non-Romance languages typically use 'g' to represent /g/ regardless of position.
Amongst European languages Dutch is an exception as it does not have /g/ in its
native words, and instead 'g' represents a voiced velar fricative /?/, a sound t
hat does not occur in modern English, but there is a dialectal variation - many
Netherlandic dialects use a voiceless fricative ([x] or [?]) instead, and in sou
thern dialects it may be palatalized to [?]. Nevertheless, word-finally it is al
ways voiceless in all dialects, including standard Netherlandic and standard Bel
gian Dutch. On the other hand, some dialects (like Amelands), may have a phonemi
c /g/.
Faroese uses 'g' to represent /d?/, in addition to /g/, and also uses it to indi
cate a glide.
In Maori (Te Reo Maori), 'g' is used in the combination 'ng' which represents th
e velar nasal /?/ and is pronounced like the 'ng' in singer.
In older Czech and Slovak orthographies, 'g' was used to represent /j/, while /g
/ was written as 'g' (g with caron).
Equivalent letters in other scripts
Strictly speaking, the letter 'g' is not present in other scripts, but the voice
d velar plosive (/g/ or "hard G") sound is present in many world languages, and
is represented by many different graphemes.
The Cyrillic script analogue is marked as '?' (e.g. in Russian, Bulgarian, Maced
onian, Serbian, etc.) or '?' (in Ukrainian as additional letter with a slightly
different pronunciation). The Hebrew analogue is gimel '?'. Devanagari has forms
for both aspirated and un-aspirated 'g' sounds. (?,?)
Classical Arabic did not have plain /g/ in its native words (the palatalized for
m /g?/ or /?/ is believed to have been used), but the sound is standard in Moder
n Standard Arabic in Egypt, so as [g] is the standard sound in Egyptian Arabic,
in which loanwords are normally transcribed with '?' (Gim). However, foreign wor
ds containing /g/ may be transcribed using other letters, such as: ? (Gaf, not p
art of standard letters), ? (qaf), ? (kaf), ? (Ghain) in loanwords or in varieti
es of Arabic, but not in Egypt, because '?' is normally pronounced [g] in all ca
ses.
Related letters and other similar characters

g: Latin letter script small G

G g : Latin letter G with circumflex
G g : Latin letter G with breve
? ? : Latin gamma
? ? : Latin letter yogh
G ? : Greek letter gamma
? ? : Cyrillic letter ge
? ? : Cyrillic letter gje
? ? : Cyrillic letter ghayn
? : Hebrew letter Gimel
Computing codes
Character
G
g
Unicode name
LATIN CAPITAL LETTER G
Encodings
decimal
hex
Unicode
71
U+0047 103
UTF-8 71
47
103
67
Numeric character reference
G
EBCDIC family 199
C7
135
ASCII 1
71
47
103

LATIN SMALL LETTER G

decimal
hex
U+0067
G g g
87
67

1 Also for encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 an
d Macintosh families of encodings.
Other representations
NATO phonetic Morse code
Golf

ICS Golf.svg
Semaphore Golf.svg
?
Signal flag
Flag semaphore Braille
dots-1245
See also
Carolingian G
hard and soft G
insular G
letter G in freemasonry
References
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. 1976.
Evertype.com
Encyclopaedia Romana
External links
Media related to G at Wikimedia Commons
The dictionary definition of G at Wiktionary
The dictionary definition of g at Wiktionary