The evolution of the Latin alphabet's G can be traced back to the Latin alphabet's predecessor, the
Greek alphabet. The voiced velar stop was represented by the third letter of the Greek alphabet,
gamma (Γ), which was later adopted by the
Etruscan language. Latin then borrowed this "rounded form" of gamma, C, to represent the same sound in words such as
recei, which was likely an early dative form of
rex, meaning "king", as found in an "early Latin inscription." Over time, however, the letter C shifted to represent the
voiceless velar stop, leading to the displacement of the letter K. Scholars believe that this change can be attributed to the influence of the Etruscan language on Latin. he was the first Roman to open a fee-paying school, around 230 BCE. At this time, '
K' had fallen out of favor, and 'C', which had formerly represented both and before open vowels, had come to express in all environments. Ruga's positioning of 'G' shows that
alphabetic order related to the letters' values as
Greek numerals was a concern even in the 3rd century BCE. According to some records, the original seventh letter, 'Z', had been purged from the Latin alphabet somewhat earlier in the 3rd century BCE by the
Roman censor Appius Claudius, who found it distasteful and foreign. Sampson (1985) suggests 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." George Hempl proposed in 1899 that there never was such a "space" in the alphabet and that in fact 'G' was a direct descendant of
zeta. Zeta took shapes like ⊏ in some of the
Old Italic scripts; the development of the
monumental form 'G' from this shape would be exactly parallel to the development of 'C' from
gamma. He suggests that the pronunciation > was due to contamination from the also similar-looking 'K'. Eventually, both
velar consonants and developed
palatalized allophones before front vowels; consequently in today's
Romance languages, and have different sound values depending on context (known as
hard and soft C and
hard and soft G). Because of
French influence,
English language orthography shares this feature.
Typographic variants include a double-storey and a single-storey
g.|alt=Image shows the two forms of the letter g|class=skin-invert-image The modern
lowercase has two typographic variants: the single-storey (sometimes "opentail") and the double-storey (sometimes "looptail") . The single-storey form derives from the majuscule (uppercase) form by raising the
serif that distinguishes it from 'c' to the top of the loop (thus closing the loop), and extending the vertical stroke downward and to the left. The double-storey form had developed similarly, except that some ornate forms then extended the tail back to the right, and to the left again, forming a closed
bowl or loop. In the double-storey version, a small top stroke in the upper-right, often terminating in an orb shape, is called an "ear". The loop-tail form is the original one, as seen in 9th century
Carolingian script; evolving over centuries of
monastic copying, the open-tail variant came to predominate and it was this that
Gutenberg adopted when creating the first
Blackletter typefaces until that in turn was replaced by
Humanist minuscule, which reasserted the closed-tail form. Generally, the two forms are complementary and interchangeable; the form displayed is a
typeface selection choice. In
Unicode, the two appearances are generally treated as glyph variants with no
semantic difference. Most
serif typefaces use the looptail form (for example, ) and most
sans-serif typefaces use the opentail form (for example, ) but the
code point in both cases is U+0067. For applications where the single-storey variant must be distinguished (such as strict
IPA in a typeface where the usual g character is double-storey), the character is available, as well as an upper case version, . Occasionally the difference has been exploited to provide contrast. In the
International Phonetic Alphabet, opentail has always represented a
voiced velar plosive, while looptail represented a
voiced velar fricative from 1895 to 1900. In 1948, the Council of the
International Phonetic Association recognized and as typographic equivalents, and this decision was reaffirmed in 1993. While the 1949
Principles of the International Phonetic Association recommended the use of for a velar plosive and for an advanced one for languages where it is preferable to distinguish the two, such as Russian, this practice never caught on. The 1999
Handbook of the International Phonetic Association, the successor to the
Principles, abandoned the recommendation and acknowledged both shapes as acceptable variants. In 2018, a study found that native English speakers have little conscious awareness of the looptail form The authors write: "Despite being questioned repeatedly, and despite being informed directly that G has two lowercase print forms, nearly half of the participants failed to reveal any knowledge of the looptail 'g', and only 1 of the 38 participants was able to write looptail 'g' correctly". ==Use in writing systems==