Hard and soft G


In the Latin-based orthographies of many European languages, the letter is used in different contexts to represent two distinct phonemes that in English are called hard and soft . The sound of a hard is usually the voiced velar plosive while the sound of a soft may be a fricative or affricate, depending on the language. In English, the sound of soft is the affricate, as in general, giant, and gym.'' A at the end of a word usually renders a hard , while if a soft rendition is intended it would be followed by a silent .

History

This alternation has its origins in a historical palatalization of which took place in Late Latin, and led to a change in the pronunciation of the sound before the front vowels and. Later, other languages not descended from Latin, such as English, inherited this feature as an orthographic convention. The Scandinavian languages, however, have undergone their shift independently.

English

In English orthography, the pronunciation of hard is and that of soft is ; the French soft,, survives in a number of French loanwords, also sometimes occurs as an allophone of in some accents in certain words.
In words of Greco-Latinate origin, the soft pronunciation occurs before while the hard pronunciation occurs elsewhere. In some words of Germanic origin, loan words from other languages, and irregular Greco-Latinate words, the hard pronunciation may occur before as well. The orthography of soft is fairly consistent: a soft is almost always followed by. The notable exceptions are gaol and margarine. The soft pronunciation of algae, the only one heard in North America, is sometimes cited as an exception, but it is actually conformant, being an alternate spelling for a vowel in the family. Though this pronunciation is listed first in some British dictionaries, hard pronunciation due to misinterpretation of the digraph is widespread in British English and is listed second or alone in some British dictionaries. In some words, a soft has lost its trailing due to suffixing, but the combination would automatically require the soft pronunciation anyway.
Digraphs and trigraphs, such as,, and, have their own pronunciation rules.
While, which also has hard and soft pronunciations, exists alongside , has no analogous letter or letter combination which consistently indicates a hard sound, even though English uses consistently for the soft sound. This leads to special issues regarding the "neatness" of orthography when suffixes are added to words that end in a hard- sound. This additionally leads to many words spelled with g and pronounced with a hard, including what may be the most common g word "get".

Suffixation

When suffixes are added to words ending with a hard or soft , the sound is normally maintained. Sometimes the normal rules of spelling changes before suffixes can help signal whether the hard or soft sound is intended. For example, as an accidental byproduct of the rule that doubles consonants in this situation after a short vowel, a double will normally indicate the hard pronunciation.
There are occasional exceptions where alternations between the hard and soft sound occur before different suffixes. Examples are analogous vs. analogy ; similarly, prodigal with prodigy. These are generally cases where the entire word, including the suffix, has been imported from Latin, and the general Romance-language pattern of soft before front vowels, but hard otherwise, is preserved.
Sometimes a silent letter is added to help indicate pronunciation. For example, a silent usually indicates the soft pronunciation, as in change; this may be maintained before a suffix to indicate this pronunciation, despite the rule that usually drops this letter. A silent can also indicate a soft pronunciation, particularly with the suffixes -gion and -gious. A silent can indicate a hard pronunciation in words borrowed from French or words influenced by French spelling conventions ; a silent serves a similar purpose in Italian-derived words.
A silent can occur at the end of a word – or at the end of a component root word that is part of a larger word – after as well as word-internally. In this situation, the usually serves a marking function that helps to indicate that the immediately before it is soft. Examples include image, management, and pigeon. Such a silent also indicates that the vowel before is a historic long vowel, as in rage, oblige, and range. When adding one of the above suffixes, this silent is often dropped and the soft pronunciation remains. While commonly indicates a soft pronunciation, the silent may be dropped before another consonant while retaining the soft pronunciation in a number of words such judgment and abridgment. Also, the word veg, a clipped form of vegetate, retains the soft pronunciation despite being spelled without a silent . Similarly, soft is sometimes replaced by in some names of commercial entities, such as with "Enerjy Software", or "Majic 105.7" in Cleveland, Ohio and some names commonly spelled with are given unusual soft spellings such as Genna and Gennifer.

Letter combinations

A number of two-letter combinations or digraphs follow their own pronunciation patterns and, as such, may not follow the hard/soft distinction of. For example, often represents or as in finger. The letters, when final, represent, as in orange; when not final their pronunciation varies according to the word's etymology. In most cases, represents as in dagger, but it may also represent as in suggest and exaggerate. Other letter combinations that don't follow the paradigm include,, and.
The digraph is sometimes used to indicate a hard pronunciation before , including cases where is silent. In some cases, the intervening is pronounced as /w/.

Other languages

Latin script

All modern Romance languages make the hard/soft distinction with, except a few that have undergone spelling reforms such as Ladino or Haitian Creole and archaic variants like Sardinian. The hard is in almost all those languages, though the soft pronunciation, which occurs before, differs amongst them as follows:
Different languages use different strategies to indicate a hard pronunciation before front vowels:
A soft pronunciation before non-front vowels is usually indicated by a silent or , though Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan use as in jueves.
Several North Germanic languages also make a hard/soft distinction. Again, the hard is in most of these languages, but the soft differs as follows:
Icelandic orthography is a bit more complicated by having lenited pronunciations of.
In German, the g is mostly a hard g, also before e and i: geben, Geld, Gier, Gift. Soft g occurs in loanwoards, usually preserving the original pronunciation. So in words of French origin like Orange, logieren or Etage, the g is pronounced as ; words taken from English like Gin or Gender use the -sound. However others, such as agieren, Generation or Gymnasium, are pronounced with a hard g. Some pronunciations vary by region: The word Giraffe is pronounced with a soft G in Austria, but with a hard G in Germany. The g in Magnet is pronounced as a hard g, but the gn in Champagner is pronounced like the French gn in champagne. The letter combination ng is usually merged to a velar nasal, and the g is not spoken in its own right; e.g., in the German word Finger, it is not audible as in the English word finger. However, when those letters are pronounced separately, as in compound words like Eingabe or also in verbs like fingieren, both the n and the hard g is clearly audible. There are exceptions in loanwords like French-derived rangieren, spoken with a velar nasal and a soft g.
Other languages typically have hard pronunciations except possibly in loanwords where it may represent or.
The orthography of Luganda is similar to Italian in having a soft pronunciation before front vowels and indicates this soft pronunciation.
Because Esperanto orthography is phonemic, always represents a hard g; a soft g is represented by the accented letter Ĝ|
The Vietnamese alphabet does not have a hard or a soft per se. However, since it was inherited from European Romance languages except the diacritics which were from Greek; the letter never occurs in "soft positions", i.e. before, and where the digraph is used instead. Likewise, the trigraph also replaces the digraph in those positions. "gh" can be explained as following Italian convention, and "ngh" as a form of analogy. However, there still is which is considered a digraph on its own, even in the word gì.

Other scripts

In Modern Greek, which uses the Greek alphabet, the Greek letter gamma – which is ancestral to the Roman letters and – has "soft-type" and "hard-type" pronunciations, though Greek speakers do not use such a terminology. The "soft" pronunciation occurs before and , and before,,,, and . In other instances, the "hard" pronunciation occurs.
In the Russian alphabet, represents both hard and soft pronunciations, and, respectively. The soft pronunciation of occurs before any of the "softening" vowels and the hard pronunciation occurs elsewhere. However, the letter functions as a "soft g" in the Romance sense, with alterations between and common in the language. In other Slavic languages, there are similar phenomena involving and .
In Modern Hebrew, which uses the Hebrew alphabet, the letter gimel typically has the sound within Hebrew words, although in some Sephardic dialects, it represents or when written with a dagesh, and when without a dagesh. An apostrophe-like symbol called a Geresh can be added immediately to the left of a gimel.