G
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The letter G is the seventh letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English is gee (jē, IPA: [dʒiː]).
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History
The letter G was created by the Romans from C to distinguish voiced /g/ from voiceless /k/.
 Hebrew gimel |
 Phoenician gimel |
 Classical Greek gamma |
 Early Latin |
 Late Latin |
The recorded originator of the letter G is Spurius Carvilius Ruga, the first Roman to open a fee-paying school, who taught around 230 BC:
The first derived letter of the Latin alphabet can be dated to the 3rd century BCE. Latin phonology was different from Etruscan; while Q was used for the labiovelar /kʷ/, C continued to represent /k/ (even before /e/ and /i/ since K had become unpopular and fallen out of general use in favour of C. Latin had a voiced velar /ɡ/, however, which C also represented. Ruga amended the Latin script by replacing the seventh letter, Z, which represented the unneeded Greek sound /dz/, with a C modified with a stroke. 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." Alphabet order was also connected with Greek numerals, which may have governed its importance.[1]
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[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. 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.
Usage
In English, the letter represents a voiced postalveolar affricate /dʒ/) ("soft G"), as in: giant, ginger, and geology; or a voiced velar plosive /g/ ("hard G"), as in: goose, gargoyle, and game. In some words of French origin, the "soft G" is pronounced as a fricative (/ʒ/), as in rouge, beige, and genre. Generally, G is soft before E, I, and Y, and hard otherwise, but there are many English words of non-Romance origin where G is hard regardless of position, and three (gaol, margarine, and the name Sacagawea) in which it is soft even before an A.
Most non-Romance languages use G to represent /g/ regardless of position (however the Dutch language does not have /g/ in its native words, and instead G is pronounced as a voiced velar fricative /ɣ/ (a sound that does not occur in English). While the soft value of G varies in different Romance languages (/ʒ/ in French, Catalan, and Portuguese, /ʤ/ in Italian, and /x/ in Castillian Spanish and /h/ in other dialects of Spanish. In general, soft G is pronounced the same as the J of the same language.
Several digraphs are common in English. GH originally represented the letter yogh which English adopted from Old Irish, and took various values including /g/, /ɣ/, /x/, and /j/. It now has a great variety of values, including /f/ in enough, /g/ in loan words like spaghetti, and as an indicator of a letter's "long" pronunciation in words like eight and night. GN, with value /n/, is also common, as in sign.
In Italian, GH is used to represent a /g/ value before front vowels where G would otherwise represent a soft value, and GN is used to represent the palatal nasal /ɲ/, a sound similar to the NY in canyon).
The Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez proposed to simplify the Spanish spelling by using just the versions with j. The rest of Spanish speakers did not follow him, but his works, and the translations of Rabindranath Tagore made by Jiménez's wife Zenobia Camprubí, are published in his spelling.
Codes for computing
| NATO phonetic | Morse code | ||
| Golf | |||
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| Signal flag | Semaphore | ASL Manual | Braille |
In Unicode the capital G is codepoint U+0047 and the lowercase g is U+0067.
The ASCII code for capital G is 71 and for lowercase g is 103; or in binary 01000111 and 01100111, correspondingly.
The EBCDIC code for capital G is 199 and for lowercase g is 135.
The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "G" and "g" for upper and lower case respectively.
Meanings for G
- In architecture, G sometimes labels a call button in elevators and may refer to either the "ground floor" or "garage floor".
- In astronomy,
- G stands for a yellowish class of stars in the Morgan-Keenan system
- G is a provisional designation prefix for any comet, asteroid, or minor planet discovered between April 1 and 15 of a year.
- In aviation, "g's" are the colloquial term for the perceived factor of increase in the force of gravity on the aircraft or pilot due to acceleration during maneuvers. See also "g" in physics below.
- In biochemistry,
- In the CGS system of units, capital G is the symbol for the unit of magnetic induction, the gauss.
- In computer games,
- G is a character in Sega's House of the Dead series of arcade games.
- G represents currency in some computer role-playing games, meaning gold.
- G is the class of gnomes and g is a gremlin in the Roguelike game NetHack.
- In computing, G is a binary prefix for giga, meaning 230 = 1,073,741,824 (cf. G as an SI or metric prefix, given below).
- In economics, G is usually used to represent government spending or government expenditure.
- In electrical engineering, G is often used as the name of the variable for conductance.
- In English slang,
- G is short for a "grand", which is itself a slang term for a thousand currency units.
- G may refer to the drug GHB.
- The spoken "g" is a common way to refer to a gram of a substance in the illegal drug trade; although this is derived from the SI symbol for gram, it would be unusual to say "g" rather than "gram" in any other context in speech.
- In film,
- G is a rating given by the Motion Picture Association of America, meaning the film is suitable for all ("general") audiences.
- G is a 1974 British film.
- G is a 2002 American independent film, later released to movie theaters in 2005.
- In finance, G is the New York Stock Exchange ticker symbol for The Gillette Company
- In Freemasonry,
the letter G is often found in the Masonic Square and Compasses symbol. Its meaning is sometimes attributed, without authority, to the word "God" or "geometry".
The Masonic Square and Compasses
- In international licence plate codes, G stands for Gabon.
- In international relations, G is often used with a number to refer to a group of nations with a common interest, such as the G8, G10, G20, and G77.
- In literature, G. is the title of a novel by John Berger, awarded the Booker Prize in 1972.
- In music,
- G is a note.
- G is a solo album by Gerald Levert released in 2000.
- G stands for "gangsta", particularly in lyrics within the gangsta rap genre.
- G! Festival is a music festival in Gøta, Faroe Islands.
- In navigation, GEE is a British radio navigation device used during World War II.
- In programming languages, G is the graphical programming language used in LabVIEW.
- In physics,
- G (always in uppercase) is the gravitational constant.
- g (always in lowercase) is the unit of acceleration due to gravity.
- As the first letter of a postal code,
- In Canada, G stands for the eastern part of Quebec.
- In the United Kingdom, G stands for Glasgow.
- In psychometrics, g (always in lowercase) is the symbol for general intelligence.
- In radio communication,
- G is one of the ITU prefixes allocated to the United Kingdom.
- the G band is the range of frequencies from 4 to 6 GHz.
- In the RGB color model, G stands for the color green.
- In sexology, the G-spot is a part of the vagina that allegedly causes an orgasm when stimulated.
- In the SI and metric systems of units:
- In sports,
- G is often an abbreviation for Goals or Goals Scored in score keeping.
- The G is the popular colloquial name for the Melbourne Cricket Ground.
- In statistics, G-tests are a type of statistical likelihood ratio test.
- In television,
See also
External links
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