G

G is a letter of the Latin (Roman) alphabet, the script now used to write English and most languages of western Europe and, today, much of the world. It represents the voiced stop /g/. Historically it is a Roman innovation: about the third century BCE a bar was added to C to distinguish /g/ from /k/, an addition credited to Spurius Carvilius Ruga.

Unlike the Hebrew and Greek alphabets, the Latin (Roman) alphabet never developed a systematic per-letter mystical or numerological tradition: Roman numerals form a separate, non-alphabetic system, so this entry stays with the letter's linguistic and historical record. The Roman alphabet is the youngest of the three historical scripts covered in this atlas: Latium adapted it around the 7th century BCE from a west Greek alphabet, reaching it through Etruscan intermediaries who had themselves taken their letters from Greek colonists settled in the bay of Naples. Latin calls each letter simply by its sound rather than by an inherited name, unlike Hebrew and Greek, and it never built an alphabetic numeral system of its own, so there is no ancient Latin counterpart to Hebrew gematria or Greek isopsephy; Roman numerals are a separate, non-alphabetic notation.

A modern practice called name numerology, drawn from a twentieth-century repeating 1-to-9 chart and commonly marketed as Pythagorean despite no documented link to Pythagoras, assigns the letter G the digit 7; a rival popular scheme, the so-called Chaldean system, assigns different digits to the same letters, so even the two modern schemes disagree with each other.

G is unusual among Latin letters in having a documented birthday. As covered elsewhere in this atlas, early Latin used C for both the /k/ and /g/ sounds inherited from Etruscan, which did not distinguish them. Roman tradition, recorded by later writers such as Plutarch, credits the freedman scribe Spurius Carvilius Ruga with resolving the ambiguity around 230 BCE by adding a short stroke to the base of C, producing a new letter reserved for the voiced /g/ sound. The new G was inserted into the alphabet at the seventh position, the slot Greek zeta had occupied but which Latin, lacking a use for zeta's sound at the time, had left empty since the alphabet's adoption.

Z was later reintroduced at the very end of the alphabet, alongside Y, when Latin needed to spell Greek loanwords, leaving G to hold the seventh spot Z had originally owned. The lowercase g split into two distinct printed shapes during the history of type: a single-story form, close to the capital, common in handwriting and sans-serif fonts, and a double-story form with a closed loop below the line, standard in serif book type since the Renaissance, an unusual case of one letter carrying two unrelated lowercase outlines in ordinary use today.