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The letter 'G.
' was introduced in the Old Latin period as a variant of c to distin guish voiced, // from voiceless, /k/. The recorded originator of g is freedman Spur ius Carvilius Ruga, the first Roman to open a fee-paying school, who taught arou nd 230 BC. At this time k had fallen out of favor, and c, which had formerly represe nted both // and /k/ before open vowels, had come to express /k/ in all environme nts. Ruga's positioning of g shows that alphabetic order, related to the letters' value s as Greek numerals, was a concern even in the 3rd century BC. Sampson (1985) su ggests 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 crea ted by the dropping of an old letter."[2] According to some records, the origina l seventh letter, z, had been purged from the Latin alphabet somewhat earlier in t he 3rd century BC by the Roman censor Appius Claudius, who found it distasteful and foreign.[3] Eventually, both velar consonants /k/ and // developed palatalized allophones bef ore front vowels; consequently in today's Romance languages, c and g have different sound values depending on context. Because of French influence, English orthogra phy shares this feature. [edit]Typographic forms
Typographic variants include a double-story and single-story g. The modern lower case g has two typographic variants: the single-story (sometimes opentail) and the double-story (sometimes looptail) . The single-story version deri ves from the majuscule (upper-case) form by raising the serif that distinguishes it from c to the top of the loop, thus closing the loop, and extending the vertic al stroke downward and to the left. The double-story form developed similarly, e xcept that some ornate forms then extended the tail back to the right, and to th e left again, forming a closed bowl or loop. The initial extension to the right was absorbed into the upper closed bowl. The double-story 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-story version, a small stroke in the upper-right, often terminating in an orb shape, is called a n "ear". Generally, the two are complementary, but occasionally the difference has been e xploited to provide contrast. The 1949 Principles of the International Phonetic Association recommends using for advanced voiced velar plosives (denoted by Lat in small letter script G) and for regular ones where the two are contrasted,[ci tation needed] but this suggestion was never accepted by phoneticians in general ,[citation needed] and today is the symbol used in the International Phonetic Alp habet, with acknowledged as an acceptable variant, and is more often used in prin ted materials.[citation needed] [edit]Usage In English, the letter represents either a voiced postalveolar affricate /d/ ("so ft G"), as in giant, ginger, and geology; a voiced velar plosive // ("hard G"), a s in goose, gargoyle, and game; or, in the digraph ng, either a velar nasal / / as in length or a blend of the latter with the hard G as in jungle; or, in the digr aph dg as in bridge. In some words of French origin, the "soft G" is pronounced as a fricative (//), as in rouge, beige, and genre. In words of Romance origin, g is usually soft before e, i, and y and hard otherwise, hough it is soft in algae, gaol, and an alternate pronunciation of vegan. 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 (margarine). Non-Romance languages typically use g to represent // regardless of position. Among st European languages Dutch is an exception as it does not have // in its native words, and instead g represents a voiced velar fricative //, a sound that does not occur in modern English. Faroese uses g to represent /d/, in addition to //, and als o uses it to indicate a glide.
While the soft value of g varies in different Romance languages (// in French and P ortuguese, [(d)] in Catalan, /d/ in Italian and Romanian, and /x/ in Castilian Span ish, and /h/ in other dialects of Spanish), in all except Romanian and Italian, soft g has the same pronunciation as the j. Several digraphs are common in English. g h which came about when the letter yogh was removed from the alphabet, and took v arious values including //, //, /x/, and /j/. It now has a great variety of values , including /f/ in enough, // in loan words like spaghetti, and as an indicator o f a letter's "long" pronunciation in words like eight and night. Gn with value /nj / is also common in loanwords, as in lasagna (though initially, as in gnome, the g is simply silent). In Italian and Romanian, gh is used to represent // 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 English canyon. In Ital ian, the trigraph gli, when appearing before a vowel, represents the palatal later al approximant //; in the definite article and pronoun gli /i/, the digraph gl repre sents the same sound. In Maori (Te Reo Mori), g is used in the combination ng which represents the velar

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The letter 'G.

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