G
G | |
---|---|
G g | |
Usage | |
Writing system | Latin language |
Phonetic usage |
|
Time period | ~-300 to present |
Descendants | |
Sisters | |
Transliteration equivalents | C |
Other | |
Other letters commonly used with | gh, g(x) |
Writing direction | Left-to-Right |
ISO basic Latin alphabet |
---|
AaBbCcDdEeFfGgHhIiJjKkLlMmNnOoPpQqRrSsTtUuVvWwXxYyZz |
G, or g, is the seventh letter of 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 /ˈdʒiː/), plural gees.[1]
The lowercase version can be written in two forms: the single-storey (sometimes "opentail") and the double-storey (sometimes "looptail") . The former is commonly used in handwriting and fonts based on it, especially fonts intended to be read by children.
History
Egyptian | Phoenician gaml |
Western Greek Gamma |
Etruscan C |
Old Latin C |
Latin G | ||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
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
The recorded originator of 'G' is
Ruga's positioning of 'G' shows that
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
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
Generally, the two forms are complementary and interchangeable; the form displayed is a typeface selection choice. 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 Ɡ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SCRIPT G.
Occasionally the difference has been exploited to provide contrast. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, opentail ⟨⟩ has always represented a voiced velar plosive, while looptail ⟨⟩ 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]
In 2018, a study found that native English speakers have little conscious awareness of the looptail form (). The authors 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".[14][15]
Use in writing systems
Languages in italics are not usually written using the Latin alphabet | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|
Language | Dialect(s) | Pronunciation (IPA) | Environment | Notes |
Afrikaans | /x/ | |||
Arabic | /ɡ/ | Romanization of ⟨ق⟩ or ⟨ج⟩ in the Arabic alphabet | ||
Azeri | /ɟ/ | |||
Catalan | /ɡ/ | Except before e, i | ||
/(d)ʒ/ | Before e, i | |||
Mandarin Chinese | Standard | /k/ | Pinyin romanization | |
Danish | /k/ | Except word-initially | ||
/ɡ/ | Word-initially | |||
Dutch | Standard
|
/ɣ/ | ||
Southern dialects | / ɣ̟ /
|
|||
Northern dialects | /χ/ | |||
English | /ɡ/ | Any | ||
/dʒ/ | Before e, i, y | |||
/ʒ/ | Before e, i in more recent 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 | |||
/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 | |||
Fijian | /ŋ/ | |||
French | /ɡ/ | Except before e, i, y | ||
/ʒ/ | Before e, i, y | |||
Galician | /ɡ/~/ħ/ | Except before e, i | See Gheada for consonant variation | |
/ʃ/ | Before e, i | Obsolete, replaced by ⟨x⟩ | ||
Greek | /ɡ/ | Except before ai, e, i, oi, y | Romanization | |
/ɟ/ | Before ai, e, i, oi, y | |||
Icelandic | /c/ | soft | ||
/k/ | hard | |||
/ɣ/ | hard, lenited; see Icelandic phonology | |||
/j/ | soft, lenited | |||
Irish | /ɡ/ | Except after i or before e, i | ||
/ɟ/ | After i or before e, i | |||
Italian | /ɡ/ | Except before e, i | ||
/dʒ/ | Before e, i | |||
Malay | /g/ | |||
Norman | /ɡ/ | Except before e, i | ||
/dʒ/ | Before e, i | |||
Norwegian | /ɡ/ | Except before ei, i, j, øy, y | ||
/j/ | Before ei, i, j, øy, y | |||
Portuguese | /ɡ/ | Except before e, i, y | ||
/ʒ/ | Before e, i, y | |||
Romanian | /ɡ/ | Except before e, i | ||
/dʒ/ | Before e, i | |||
Romansh | /ɡ/ | Except before e, i | ||
/dʑ/ | Before e, i | |||
Samoan | /ŋ/ | |||
Scottish Gaelic | /k/ | Except after i or before e, i | ||
/kʲ/ | After i or before e, i | |||
Spanish | /ɡ/ | Except before e, i, y | ||
/x/ or /h/ | Before e, i, y | Variation between velar and glottal realizations depends on dialect | ||
Swedish | /ɡ/ | Except before ä, e, i, ö, y | ||
/j/ | Before ä, e, i, ö, y | |||
Turkish | /ɡ/ | Except before e, i, ö, ü | ||
/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
- a voiced velar plosive (/ɡ/ or "hard" ⟨g⟩), as in goose, gargoyle, and game;
- a voiced palato-alveolar affricate(/d͡ʒ/ or "soft" ⟨g⟩), predominates before ⟨i⟩ or ⟨e⟩, as in giant, ginger, and geology; or
- a voiced palato-alveolar sibilant (/ʒ/) in post-medieval loanwords from French, such as rouge, beige, genre (often), and margarine(rarely)
⟨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
The double consonant ⟨
The digraph ⟨
The digraph ⟨
- 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 ⟨
- /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
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, ⟨
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
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'.
Other systems
In the International Phonetic Alphabet, ⟨ɡ⟩ represents the voiced velar plosive. The small caps ⟨ɢ⟩ represents the voiced uvular plosive.
Other uses
- Unit prefix G, meaning 1,000,000,000 times.
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[16]
- 𝼁 : Latin small letter reversed script g, an extension to IPA for disordered speech (extIPA)[17][18]
- ᵷ : Turned g
- 𝼂 : Latin letter small capital turned g, an extension to IPA for disordered speech (extIPA)[17][18]
- 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[19]
- Ꝿ ꝿ : Turned insular g
- Ꟑ ꟑ : Closed insular g, used in the Ormulum[19]
- 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[20]
- 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[20]
- 𐞓 : Modifier letter small g with hook, used as a superscript IPA letter[20]
- ᴳ ᵍ : Modifier letters are used in the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet[21]
- ꬶ : Used for the Teuthonista phonetic transcription system[22]
- G with ᶃ
- ց : Armenian alphabet Tso
Ligatures and abbreviations
Other representations
Computing
Preview | G | g | Ɡ | ɡ | G | g | ||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Unicode name | LATIN CAPITAL LETTER G | LATIN SMALL LETTER G | LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SCRIPT G | LATIN SMALL LETTER SCRIPT G | FULLWIDTH LATIN CAPITAL LETTER G | FULLWIDTH LATIN SMALL LETTER G | ||||||
Encodings | decimal | hex | dec | hex | dec | hex | dec | hex | dec | hex | dec | hex |
Unicode | 71 | U+0047 | 103 | U+0067 | 42924 | U+A7AC | 609 | U+0261 | 65319 | U+FF27 | 65351 | U+FF47 |
UTF-8 | 71 | 47 | 103 | 67 | 234 158 172 | EA 9E AC | 201 161 | C9 A1 | 239 188 167 | EF BC A7 | 239 189 135 | EF BD 87 |
Numeric character reference | G |
G |
g |
g |
Ɡ |
Ɡ |
ɡ |
ɡ |
G |
G |
g |
g |
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
NATO phonetic
|
Morse code |
Golf |
ⓘ |
Signal flag | Flag semaphore | American manual alphabet (ASL fingerspelling) | British manual alphabet (BSL fingerspelling )
|
Braille dots-1245 Unified English Braille |
See also
- Carolingian G
- Hard and soft G
- Latin letters used in mathematics § Gg
References
- ^ The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. 1976.
- ^ Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 2023-05-08.
- ISBN 9781444359855.
- ^ 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.
- JSTOR 282560.
- JSTOR 44707535.
- JSTOR 44701257.
- JSTOR 44705217.
- S2CID 249420050.
- JSTOR i40200179.
- Reprinted in Journal of the International Phonetic Association 40 (3), December 2010, pp. 299–358, .
- ^ 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.
- ISBN 0-521-63751-1.
- S2CID 4571477.
- ^ 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.
- ^ 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.
- ^ a b 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.
- ^ a b 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.
- ^ a b 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.
- ^ a b c 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.
- ^ 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
- Media related to G at Wikimedia Commons
- The dictionary definition of G at Wiktionary
- The dictionary definition of g at Wiktionary
- Lewis and Short Latin Dictionary: G