History of "G" ?
The letter G was created by the Romans because they felt that C was not an adequate letter to represent both /k/ and /g/.
The first derived letter of the Latin alphabet can be dated to the 3rd century BCE. 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/g/, 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." LATIN LETTER G is a derived letter which has become a basic letter of the Latin alphabet
According to some records, the 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; thus, the issue of alphabetic order (also connected with Greek numerals) was still a concern in Spurius' day.
As the sound /k/ did, /g/ also developed palatal and velar allophones which is why today, G has different sound values in all 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. And 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: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G
The first derived letter of the Latin alphabet can be dated to the 3rd century BCE. 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/g/, 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." LATIN LETTER G is a derived letter which has become a basic letter of the Latin alphabet
According to some records, the 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; thus, the issue of alphabetic order (also connected with Greek numerals) was still a concern in Spurius' day.
As the sound /k/ did, /g/ also developed palatal and velar allophones which is why today, G has different sound values in all 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. And 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: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G
posted by G only | 11:33 AM
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