G

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Template:AZ G is the seventh letter in the Roman alphabet. Its name in English is gee (IPA [dʒi]).

Contents 1 History 2 Usage 3 Codes for computing 4 Meanings for G 5 See also

History

The letter G was created by the Romans because they felt that C was not an adequate letter to represent both /k/ and /g/.

Image:Gimel.svg Hebrew gimel

Image:Phoenician G.svg Phoenician gimel

Image:G 17162.gif Classical Greek gamma

Image:Early Latin G2.gif Early Latin

Image:Capital C.svg Late Latin

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 BCE. Latin phonology was different again from Etruscan; while Q was used for the labiovelar /k^w/, 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 /ɡ/, 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.[1]

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" Image:Opentail g.PNG and the "looptail G" Image:Looptail g.PNG. 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 Image:Opentail g.PNG for advanced voiced velar plosives and Image:Looptail g.PNG for regular ones where the two are contrasted, but this suggestion was never accepted by phoneticians in general, and today Image:Opentail g.PNG is the symbol used in the International Phonetic Alphabet, with Image:Looptail g.PNG acknowledged as an acceptable variant.

Usage

In English, the letter can be pronounced as a "soft G" (IPA Template:IPA), as in: giant, ginger, geology, or as a "hard G" (IPA Template:IPA), as in: goose, gargoyle, game. In some words of French origin, as in French generally, the "soft G" is pronounced as IPA Template:IPA, 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 pronounce G as Template:IPA regardless of position (however the Dutch language does not have a /g/ sound in its native words, and instead G is pronounced Template:IPA, a sound that does not occur in English) while in Romance languages the soft value varies, such as Template:IPA in French, Catalan, and Portuguese, Template:IPA in Italian, and Template:IPA in Castillian Spanish and Template:IPA in other dialects of Spanish. The general rule is that 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 Template:IPA, Template:IPA, Template:IPA, and Template:IPA. It now has a great variety of values, including Template:IPA in enough, Template:IPA in loan words like spaghetti, and silence in words like eight and night. GN, with value Template:IPA, is also common, as in sign.

In Italian, GH is used to force a Template:IPA value before E and I where G would take a soft value, and GN is used for Template:IPA (rather like English NY in canyon).

In Spanish, G before I or E is pronounced as the same as J. 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

{{Letter |NATO=Golf |Morse=––· |Character=G7 |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, often seen in elevators, G stands for the "Ground Floor" or "General Floor", usually the main entrance floor.
• In astronomy,
  • G stands for an April 1 through 15 discovery, in the provisional designation of a comet (e.g. C/1901 G1, the Great Comet of 1901) or asteroid (e.g. Template:Mpl).
• In biochemistry,
  • G is the symbol for glycine and guanosine.
  • G is a type of protein.
• In computer games,
  • G is a character in Sega's House of the Dead series of arcade games,
  • G is the name of a 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 prefix in the Metric system, given below)
• In electrical engineering, G is often used as the name of the variable for conductance.
• In English slang,
  • G is short for "gangsta" (gangster).
  • G is short for a "grand", which is itself a slang term for a thousand currency units.
  • G - In the illegal drug trade it is common to refer to a gram of a substance as a "g"; although this is derived from the SI symbol, referring to other SI units by their symbol in speech is uncommon. G may also refer to the drug methamphetamine.
  • G refers to a friend or associate, as in "Whasup G?" (What's up, friend?)
• 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 also the name of a British film from 1974. An American film, also called G, was released as an independent film in 2002; it was released to movie theaters in 2005.
• In finance, G is the New York Stock Exchange ticker symbol for The Gillette Company
• In international licence plate codes, G stands for Gabon.
• In literature, G. is the title of a book by John Berger. This book was awarded the Booker Prize in 1972.
• In programming languages,
  • G is the graphical programming language used in LabVIEW.
• In the RGB color model, G stands for the color green.
• In the SI system,
  • an upright capital G is the SI prefix for giga, meaning 10⁹ = 1,000,000,000.
  • an upright lowercase g is the symbol for a unit of mass, the gram.
• In the CGS system,
  • capital G is also the symbol for the unit of magnetic induction, the gauss.
• In music, G is a note.
• In physics,
  • G 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 radiocommunication, G is one of the ITU prefixes allocated to the United Kingdom.
• In sexology, the G-spot is also a part of the vagina that allegedly causes an orgasm when stimulated.
• In statistics, G is the test statistic for the G-test, a likelihood ratio test.
• In television, G is the TV Rating that stands for General, meaning the program is appropriate for everyone.
• In economics, G is usually used to represent government spending or government expenditure.
• In Freemasonry, the letter G is often found in The Masonic Square and Compasses symbol. The meaning is attributed to the word "God" or "geometry".
• G is an abbreviated nickname of Andrew G.

See also

• Ĝ and ĝ
• Ğ and ğ
• Carolingian G
• Insular G

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