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by Drublic on February 13th, 2007

Drublic

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What is the origin of upper and lower case G (Gg) in the English language?

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  • by canadianhelper on February 13th, 2007

    canadianhelper

    The letter G was created by the Romans from C to distinguish voiced /g/ from voiceless /k/.

    The recorded originator of the letter G is Spurius Carvilius Ruga, who taught around 230 BC:

    The first derived letter of the Latin alphabet can be dated to the 3rd century BrE. Latin phonology was different again from Etruscan; while Q was used for the labiovelar /kw/, C continued to represent /k/ before /e/ and /i/ as well as in other environments (K had become unpopular and fallen out of general use in favour of C). Latin had a voiced velar /?/, however, which also had to be represented by C. The first Roman to open a fee-paying school, a freedman named Spurius Carvilius Ruga, amended the Latin script by replacing the seventh letter, Z, which represented the unneeded Greek sound /dz/, with a new letter, LATIN LETTER C WITH STROKE, which we have come to know as G... Note that Ruga’s positioning of G shows that alphabetic order was a concern even in the 3rd century BCE. Sampson (1985) suggested 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.”[1]

    Alphabet order was also connected with Greek numerals, which may have governed its importance. 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]

    Eventually, both velar consonants /k/ and /g/ developed palatal and allophones before front vowels, which is why today, C and G have different sound values in the various Romance languages, as well as English (due to French influence).

    The modern minuscule (lower-case) G has two basic shapes: the "opentail G" and the "looptail G" . The opentail version derives from the majuscule (capital) form by raising the serif that distinguishes it from a C to the top of the loop, thereby closing the loop, and extending the vertical stroke downward and to the left. The looptail form developed similarly, except that some ornate forms then extended the tail back to the right, and to the left again, forming a loop. The initial extension to the left was absorbed into the upper loop. The looptail 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 looptail version, there is a tiny flick at the upper right which in typography is called its "ear".

    Generally, the two minuscule forms are interchangeable, but occasionally the difference has been exploited to make a contrast. The 1949 Principles of the International Phonetic Association recommends using for advanced voiced velar plosives and for regular ones where the two are contrasted, but this suggestion was never accepted by phoneticians in general, and today is the symbol used in the International Phonetic Alphabet, with acknowledged as an acceptable variant.

    Source Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G

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