THE HISTORY OF LETTER G
(Rodrigo Peñaloza, 2009)
In the Greek and Hebrew alphabets, the letter which corresponds to /g/ is the third one, whereas in the Latin alphabet it is the seventh. Why is this so? What is letter G’s history?
In Hebrew, the letter G corresponds to the letter ג (ghimel), the third letter of the alphabet. The letter ג (ghimel) is cognate with גמל (gamol), which means “to nurture until it is grown up”. The idea that ג (ghimel) represents the caring of the creature until it is mature was taken from what is said about Isaac inGenesis 21:8: “and the child grew (וַיּֽגָּמַל) and was weaned”.
The form of letter ג (ghimel) is simile to a camel, which in Hebrew is גָּמָל (gamol). The camel got this name because it is like a weaned child who can travel a long way without sucking. According to the Kabbalah, the ג (ghimel) simbolizes the Eternal Benefactor distributing His goodness and affection over humankind because of His חֶסֶד גְּמִילוּת (gemilus chessed) or kindness or providence. The numerical value of ג (ghimel) is 3, a number that alludes to the idea that two opposite forces must be combined in order to yield a third entity.
In Greek, the letter G is represented by Γ (capital gamma), also the third letter of the alphabet and with the same numerical value 3. It is believed that the Greek alphabet was derived from the Semitic alphabet, introduced into the Greek world by Phoenician merchants. Phoenicians denoted the phoneme /g/ by a letter very similar to the Hebrew ג (ghimel), only less stylish, and named it precisely ghimel, the Phoenician word for camel, from which gamol, the Hebrew word for camel, is a mere variation. As time went by, the Greeks changed the form of the letter to the now known capital gamma, Γ. The Phoenician ghimel is reproduced in the following figure and is sided by the corresponding Hebrew and Greek versions, for comparison:
The Latin alphabet, on its turn, derived from the Etruscan, which was taken from the Greek. In the Latin alphabet, the letter C, the third one, was used to represent, until the III century BC, both phonemes /k/ and /g/. In 312 BC, a slight modification in the form of the letter C was made in order to differentiate, in the writing, the phonemes /k/ and /g/, which were already differentiated in the spoken language. This slight modification evolved to the form G currently known. Since letters also had numerical values, the letter C kept its value 3 and the letter G was placed on the seventh spot, a place occupied by the Latin letter Z, corresponding to the Greek Z (dzeta, whose lowercase form is ζ), since the phoneme /dz/ was considered to be superfluous. Then G became the seventh letter of the Latin alphabet and Z jumped on to the last spot and became the last letter, behind the letters W, X and Y, which had been added to the Latin alphabet as representatives of the Greek letters Ω, Χ e Υ (whose lowercase forms were, respectively, ω, χ and υ), used in names of Greek origin. The old phonetic value of C as /g/ remained in the abbreviations of the names Gaius (C.) and Gnaeus (Cn.).
It is said that it was Spurius Carvilius Ruga who introduced the letter G in the Latin alphabet. He was the first man in written History to open a private elementary school. He was also the first Roman to get divorced. The primary historical references are Plutarch’s Quaestiones Romanae, LIV, and also the book De Orthographia, by Quintus Terentius Scaurus. Martianus Capella (De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, III, 261), on the contrary, attributes the introduction of G to Appius Claudius Caecus, Roman censor, in the same year 312 a.C.
It is now clear the letter G corresponds to Γ and that it is the seventh letter by an historical accident.
In order to illustrate the pictographic evolution of the alphabet promoted by the Phoenicians, it suffices to mention that the Phoenicians, excellent merchants, developed a writing system to account for their economic transactions. Based on Egyptian, Summerian and Acadian hierogliphs, they created simpler pictograms that later became the elements of the Phoenician alphabet. For the sake of illustration, the pictographic evolution of the phoneme /a/ is shown below:
