During the month of November, I'll be blogging about etymology and the origins of the alphabet
G, g: By all that is reasonable and logical,
G should derive from the Phoenician
Gimel, "throwing stick," pictured left. However, it does not. Rather, it is the only letter in the alphabet attributed to a specific individual. If we are to believe Plutarch, a freedman turned grammar-school teacher, Spurius Carvilius Ruga (parenthetically, the name Spurius means "false" or "illegitimate") created
G from the Greek
Zeta, (
I) which resembles a majuscule
I and is pronounced /
z/. Latin having no
/z/ sound, Spurius reassigned it the hard /g
/ of
gold and
glimmer. (Plutarch also credits Ruga as the first Roman to get a divorce.) In time, the leftward bars were lopped off, giving the letter a bracket look ( [ ). Almost as if under the gravitional influence of
C, which did descend from
Gimel,
G curved into a bow, retaining as a fish-hook bend in its lower half, the bottom bar of the original
zeta. The soft
/g/ sound of gem and giant did not occur until Late Latin.
God: By definition indefinable, the most that can be said is what
God is not. For example,
God is not a chipped white mug of Red Zinger Tea. Nor is
God a vagrant standing at the access road to 285 with “Will work for food” written on cardboard with a magic marker. Unless
God actually
is those things, in which case, we’re back where we started. Derived from the Old Norse
goth and ultimately from the Proto Indo-European,
gheu, “to invoke, or call upon.” Hence, God is “the one prayed to.”
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Coming November 31st, THE RETURN OF THE STOOPID CONTEST!
