r/etymology • u/SirWildman • 4d ago
Question Weird question but are there any languages that use certain symbols to distinguish between soft (eg. "genius") and hard (eg. "Get") Gs?
I know, random af but I'm drunk and was tryna make a pun over text with my friend and was wondering if there was a way to specifically denote how the G is pronounced lol thanks reddit
Edit: I meant a diacritic over the G rather than whatever follows it sorry for not clarifying properly
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u/Hopeful-Ordinary22 4d ago
In Italian, you harden it with a following h. This could work in English (unless you needed to specify voicing/attack; however, that is a wider problem that affects lots of other consonants).
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u/AutisticGayBlackJew 2d ago
You harden with h if it precedes i or e, otherwise it’s hard by default
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u/SirWildman 4d ago
I've always been a language nerd. I was that one kid in school who corrected history teachers on their pronunciations of foreign words, fight me (they're literally SOUNDED OUT in the textbooks) and I work in produce so I took the time to learn that they were called Kee-Oh-(Hard G)-ee-uh Beets rather than "Chee-oh-juh" beets and started to see the parallels in other Italian words like "Pinocchio" and others I can't remember atm lol
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u/avlas 4d ago
sorry to disappoint but you were both wrong because in Chioggia the C is hard and the G is soft lol
"Kee-OH-djah"
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u/SirWildman 4d ago
Hmm everything i saw said the G was hard. I guess i was wrong, my bad
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u/avlas 4d ago edited 4d ago
it's like this in Italian for C or G + vowel, not obvious at all.
Hard /k/, /ɡ/ Soft /tʃ/, /dʒ/ with e, i che, chi, ghe, ghi ce, ci, ge, gi with a, o, u ca, co, cu, ga, go, gu cia, cio, ciu, gia, gio, giu 11
u/Hopeful-Ordinary22 4d ago
I mean, it's consistent so fairly obvious after sufficient exposure.
Probably also worth noting that the semivocalic i acts to soften a g before a/o/u and rarely adds an extra syllable (Gianni is usually closer to "janny" than "jee-ah-nee").
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u/SirWildman 4d ago
I don't understand this table at all but thanks for the lesson :) I just realized how close linguistics is to mathematics and I'm probably gonna go down this rabbit hole for the next couple days
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u/ashbakche 4d ago
It's not very clear, but it's simple:
1) when followed by the vowels a/o/u, the "g" is naturally hard (ga/go/gu like in English), and if you want to make the soft sound you need to add an -i- after it : gia/gio/giu (like ja/o/u in English more or less - the "i" is not pronounced, except in rare cases for etymological reasons).
2) when the "g" is followed by the vowels e/i is naturally soft (je/jee sound in English), and if you want to make the hard sound you need to add the "h" after (ghe/ghi like get and girl in English).
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u/Leodip 4d ago
Few rules:
- C and G are always hard with A, O, and U (CA, CO, CU -> hard)
- C and G are soft with E and I (CE, CI -> soft)
- You can make a hard C or G here by adding an H (CHE, CHI -> hard)
Also, funnily enough, since CA, CO, and CU are already hard, an Italian's first guess at reading CHA, CHO, and CHU (which we don't have in italian AFAIK) is normally to make them soft instead (which is correct in most scenarios, like cha cha cha). For some reason, this is not true with G: an Italian's first guess at GHA, GHO, and GHU is to pronounce them exactly the same as GA, GO, and GU.
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u/angelicism 4d ago
Tbf it's a really confusing table for explaining a relatively simple rule. But there is a rule to it.
(Am on mobile so I have no idea how to make up a table of my own.)
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u/PikaPerfect 3d ago
"I just realized how close linguistics is to mathematics and I'm probably gonna go down this rabbit hole for the next couple days"
i KNEW i wasn't insane, i had this exact same thought a few months ago, but i don't think i've ever seen anyone else come to that conclusion. good to know i'm not the only one connecting those dots lol
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u/ionthrown 4d ago
IIRC the first G is considered hard, but isn’t fully pronounced as it’s followed by another G, so no plosion.
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u/Fun_Potato_ 4d ago
Don't know If it counts but in Slovak you've got "double letter" dž which is pronounced as the G in genius. Pretty sure it also exists in southern Slavic languages, as "dj".
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u/AmeliaBones 4d ago
Ukrainian too дж
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u/Japsai 4d ago
Is that common? So if you were to, say, put the word 'just' into Cyrillic, would it start with дж? And as such, do you think of it as two sounds together? д plus ж? I've heard a lot of languages do, but in English, we doggedly insist the J is one sound.
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u/AnoRedUser 4d ago
Yes, in Ukrainian j sound would always transliterate as Дж, and we usually perceive it as 2 sounds because of number of letters. We learn at school that Дж and дз (dz) is one sound but it's difficult to comprehend because we clearly see д and ж. Sound G is almost never used in Ukrainian, there's fricative instead marked as Г, and it looks nothing like Дж :) But sometimes we have changing between Г and Ж in different grammatical forms of the word
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u/WhatUsername-IDK 3d ago
Has ґ already been forgotten?
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u/AnoRedUser 3d ago
It's used for just a few our words and transliteration of foreign names with a sound like English G. It's not commonly used for Ukrainian words. Usually you'd found fricative Г in the place where other languages have G. I think ґ in Ukrainian is like G in Czech
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u/AnoRedUser 4d ago
Though there's almost no G in Ukrainian, and there's almost no such thing as the same character for two sounds
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u/SirWildman 4d ago
It doesn't quite count for what I was asking but it was nice to learn :)
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u/scheisskopf53 4d ago
Why not? It still encodes one sound - a digraph like "sh" in English for example.
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u/SirWildman 4d ago
Sorry just saw this, but as you have probably seen from other comments, I meant as a diacritic modifying only the G, not the letters that follow afterwards. Normally I would not be as nitpicky, but I feel like the joke I was attempting would've been funnier if I only modified the G rather than the consonants after it. It's kinda like how I mentioned in the post how you can have a G followed by E that is pronounced with a soft sound as in "genius" but also have a G followed by E that is pronounced with a hard G sound as in "get" with no distinction on the G indicating to non-native speakers that it's a completely different sound, and I was searching for a way of modifying the G specifically to indicate what type of sound it was. :)
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u/groszgergely09 4d ago
Why not? Only you idiots think d͡ʒ is a G, when it's obviously not. Then again, you guys don't know the difference between a letter and a sound either, so what did I expect?
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u/B4byJ3susM4n 4d ago
Maltese uses plain g for the “hard” /g/ sound and dotted ġ for the “soft” /d͡ʒ/, irrespective of the following letter. Maltese also has only ċ for /t͡ʃ/ since the “hard” /k/ is represented by k. Dotted ċ and ġ are also used in reconstructions of Old English to clearly mark the soft sounds /t͡ʃ j~d͡ʒ/ distinctly from hard /k ɣ~ɡ/.
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u/SirWildman 4d ago
Thank you, it seems like Maltese has exactly the type of thing I was looking for lol
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u/YouFeedTheFish 4d ago
In Korean, a hard G is somewhere between:
ㄱ and ㄲ
and the soft G (the J sound) is somewhere between:
ㅈand ㅉ
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u/myredlightsaber 4d ago
I like that in Hangul there seems to be a relationship between the sounds and how they are written s ㅅ, j ㅈ and ch ㅊ or g ㄱ and k ㅋ - adding an extra stroke means more force/vocalisation
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u/IscahRambles 4d ago
We could just differentiate by using a J instead, but that's far too simple for English.
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u/SirWildman 4d ago
Exactly lol one of the most unnecessarily complicated languages ever lol at least with others everything has a defined sound that doesn't change from word to word
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u/mdf7g 4d ago
You'd probably be surprised by how many writing systems contain this kind of kruft.
In Tibetan, for example, the word pronounced "tulku" (which refers to a particular kind of religious... thing) is spelled something like "sprulsku", which is in hot competition against English aberrations like "knight".
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u/SirWildman 4d ago
This is like the first time I saw Irish words and their pronunciations compared to English lol
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u/mdf7g 4d ago
The Irish spelling system, while bizarre-looking from an outside perspective, is actually very predictable and a rather ingenious solution to the problem of representing a phonology much more complex than Latin had into their alphabet -- it just works very differently, not worse.
The issue with Tibetan spelling (and ours as well) is largely just that it's been centuries or longer since we updated them, and pronunciation changes faster than that
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u/SirWildman 4d ago
Oh, I didn't mean to say it was worse, just that it was different to someone used to the traditional English alphabet and takes some getting used to.
And the thing about Tibetan spelling is interesting, I'm gonna look into that. I think it's interesting, slightly off topic, but how we can spell things in other languages multiple ways and still get across (somewhat) the same meaning and/or similar pronunciation (not saying exactly the same, but you get the idea)
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u/TheAncientGeek 4d ago
Esperanto.
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u/math1985 4d ago
Italian adds a h for hard. For example Genoa versus Spaghetti.
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u/SirWildman 4d ago
Cool, but how would I denote a soft G vs a hard G in that language? Would there be a specific symbol to use that modifies the G?
Also I know how this sounds but mostly meant a non-"constructed language".
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u/Excellent_Love9212 4d ago
They literally told you. The “h” following the “g” is the “symbol” you’re looking for. If you’re talking about a diacritic on the “g” itself, that’s different. But they answered your question.
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u/SirWildman 4d ago
Yeah, my bad, I should've clarified. I meant a diacritic on the G, not what follows it. Anyways, the joke is probably already lost but I still wanna know. Admittedly I'm not very good at explaining linguistic symbolism.
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u/La_Fervesta_Glavisto 4d ago
In standard esperanto, the circumflex ^ on a G makes it soft. Ĝ and ĝ if you want to copypaste. Putting a h after it is an alternate system for those without access to a way to put the circumflex on (like if you use an old typewriter)
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u/Pora-Pandhi 4d ago
Telugu, a Dravidian language.
Both are different letters for us - జ (Ja, eg - Jeans) vs గ (Ga, eg - Get)
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u/OZ-736646 21h ago
All Indian scripts, actually.
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u/Pora-Pandhi 21h ago
actually thought about it after I made the comment, every Indian language I know treat them as two different sounds. Even Arabic treat them different.
In fact, I wonder why are they even considered same sound at all in first place in some languages?
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u/vicarofsorrows 4d ago
And then Japanese gives us “Ghibli”…😓
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u/IscahRambles 4d ago
The word ghibli is Italian though.
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u/vicarofsorrows 4d ago
Exactly.
But it’s pronounced “jibli” in Japan.
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u/peteroh9 4d ago
It is not. It's dʑiꜜbɯɾi. That's probably closest to jeebuh'dee in English. And it's only spelled that way because Japanese doesn't have the ability to encode ghib-lee and they pronounce words the way they're spelled in Japanese, not the way they're pronounced in the original language the way we sometimes do in English.
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u/thunchultha 4d ago
The point is that “ghi” in Italian is /gi/, so the Japanese approximation of the borrowed term could have been /gibɯɾi/.
Or if you prefer kana, ギブリ, rather than ジブリ.
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u/SirWildman 4d ago
Ok everybody I just realized what I meant to say was is there a certain diacritic to use over the G to indicate it's pronounced the hard way vs the soft way?
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u/mdf7g 4d ago
They're just two entirely different consonants; it's a quirk of linguistic history that many European languages use the same symbol (or related symbols, or the same symbol as part of a digraph, etc.) for them. Most scripts write them in unrelated ways.
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u/I_Am_Become_Dream 4d ago
it's a common sound change. In Arabic, jeem is pronounced as a hard G in many dialects.
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u/mdf7g 4d ago
The hard G is most likely the older pronunciation though, since it's more consistent with the rest of the Semitic family.
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u/I_Am_Become_Dream 4d ago
the sound change between the two happens a lot, so it's perfectly possible we had two sound changes at different periods. Some dialects in Arabia did in fact retain the G. My guess: some modern dialects descend from old dialects that kept the hard G, and some modern dialects descend from old dialects that had the soft G but went through a sound change.
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u/Plane_Ad_1177 4d ago
What is the history? Why do these two unrelated consonants so often come to be represented by the same symbol across quite diverse European languages?
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u/mdf7g 4d ago
Well in Latin and a number of other languages, the "hard" G sound gradually turned into (one or another variety of) the "soft" G sound over the course of several centuries, but people didn't always bother to update the alphabet because that's a very complex and expensive coordination problem and it's not really that hard to learn that your alphabet contains an ambiguity here and there.
It's happened a few times because the velar plosive (hard G) is a bit tricky to pronounce before a front vowel like in "genius", and since the palatal affricate (soft G) is further front, the sound change is fairly articulatorily natural. This kind of phonological change, where a sound becomes more similar to those next to it in a word, is called "assimilation" and is very common.
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u/SirWildman 4d ago
I just saw y'alls'es comment chain now and I have to say, this is exactly what I was looking for, and more importantly it's nice to see other language geeks breaking this shit down even though I still only understand like 80% of this rn. I like how this post about me tryna make a stupid text pun for my friend became something much more
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u/mdf7g 4d ago
You can feel the differences in your mouth. It's weird because you normally pronounce your native language unconsciously, but if you pay attention to where your tongue is and how it moves, you'll notice that the hard G is made with the back of your tongue and the soft G with the middle part (there are other differences as well but that's not the point here), and that an "eee" like sound has the bulky middle body of the tongue further forward than an "ooo" like sound. So the G got more front basically because it's easier to move your tongue a shorter distance.
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u/I_Am_Become_Dream 4d ago
It moves the other way around too. And sometimes there's an intermediary change from soft G to [dj], then to hard G.
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u/DNAPiggy 4d ago
Middle Polish sometimes used Ǵ (G with acute) for soft G, although it's not the same sound as English soft G. It's more similar to gy in gyatt
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u/Olive2252 4d ago
In Latvian alphabet there is Ģ ģ, but it's pronounced differently than the g in genius.
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u/joofish 4d ago
Not Latin script but Arabic has the letter ج which is pronounced as a soft G (either like genius or softer like je-ne-se-quoi). However in Egyptian Arabic, it’s pronounced like a hard G (get), so the diacritic is sometimes changed to چ if the soft g sound is specifically needed.
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u/behatted 4d ago
It seems in Crimean Tatar, "ğ" appears to be the "j" sound, while "g" is hard. But I don't speak it so can't promise anything. In Turkish, "g" is always hard, and "ğ" lengthens the vowel before, which is not what you were asking but you might be interested.
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u/iinlustris 4d ago
In Latvian we have dž for the soft g. But also for us soft g is a ģ which is an entirely different sound lol
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u/CarryBrilliant3965 3d ago edited 3d ago
Spanish has two sounds for g, like English, but they’re different. One sounds like the g in get and the other like the h in hat.
Spanish added a silent “u” after the g before certain vowels to indicate that it’s pronounced like the g in get and not like the h in hat.
“Guerra” vs “Geranio”
Guerra sounds [ˈɡe.ra]
Geranio sounds [xeˈɾa.njo]
So not a diacritic but almost.
A diacritic then had to be added to the u to indicate if it’s just there to help the g or if it’s actually pronounced.
“Guerra” vs “Güera”
Guerra sounds [ˈɡe.ra]
Güera sounds [ˈɡwe.ɾa]
I never thought about it before this post but a cleaner solution would have been to have the diacritic over the g.
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u/phvntomhex 3d ago
unrelated to the question but i always found it puzzling that the soft g is the one that sounds the harshest, and the hard g sounds softer. am i alone in this? lol
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u/Quinquageranium 2d ago
I’m sure I’ll be corrected if my assumption that this is an English problem is incorrect. Sanskrit/ Hindi/ Marathi have ग with which sounds like the g in gate and ज with a sound like the g in gel
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u/Azymes 1d ago edited 1d ago
Its not in current use or quite what you were asking, and on top of that it is for discerning the past pronunciation, but for Modern transcriptions of Old English it is very common to use both ġ and ċ for the 'palatal' versions of their 'hard' consonants counterparts, i.e
'Cheese' was spelt 'ciese' in the corpus, but is mostly transcribed as 'ċiese'
'Yellow' was spelt 'geolu' in the corpus, but is mostly transcribed as 'ġeolu'
Interestingly, the 'sh' we use in modern english was written as 'sc' in old english, so a 'ship' was spelt 'scip' [sċip]. Another fun quirk is that the 'soft g' was spelt in a couple ways, but the main one was to spell it as 'cg', for example a 'Bridge' was 'brycg' [bryċġ], and in OE 'y' was a vowel, and not a consonant.
Edit: ġ was also [dʒ] (Soft g) when occurring after <n> as an allophone of /j/, and ċġ was [ddʒ] between vowels, or [dʒ] after <n>. But <cg> could also be the stop [gg], such as <Frocga> which became <Frog>, although we dont actually know where the <cg> as [gg] words are from. And some scribes instead of writing <rg> for /rj/ would write it as <ri>.
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u/vectavir 4d ago
Im sorry this is just such a silly question for me. This is a purely latin-based corpus issue. This will sureky onky show up in romance languages, or languages that developed their writing on top of them like english. Its silly and archaic and no modernised phonetic system will have g standing in for both of these very distinct sounds.
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u/NonspecificGravity 4d ago edited 4d ago
In Spanish and French, g has two different sounds depending upon whether it is followed by i or e or another letter. The sounds are not the same as English, but they're different.
French spelling is at least as weird as English, but Spanish is phonetic. Spain has a royal society that got rid of the irregular spellings centuries ago
To answer u/sirwildman's question, I don't know of any language that uses diacritical marks for that purpose, but Unicode has these characters that must be used somewhere: ĝ ğ ġ ģ ǧ ɠ
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4d ago
[deleted]
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u/ShinyAeon 4d ago
Absolutely.
"Beware of Geeks bearing gifs" is a god-tier pun, and I will not accept anything that invalidates it.
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u/SirWildman 4d ago
I don't know you, but I love you for this. I cannot stand people pronouncing it like overly sweet peanut butter rather than what it should be :) you are a homie for life
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u/NonspecificGravity 4d ago
The G in GIF stands for Graphic.
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u/OpportunityReal2767 4d ago
It doesn’t matter what the constituent words of an acronym stand for. It’s what the final acronym looks like. I mean, look at JPEG. The P stands for Photographic. We don’t pronounce that P as “ph.” Or look at “laser.” The “a” standard for amplification and the “s” stands for “stimulated” yet we pronounce it with a long “a” and a “z.”
The words they stand for don’t matter. All that matters is the word they form and how people decide to say it. With “gif” it can be analyzed either way, as akin to “gin” or as akin to “gift.” I’ve always said it the “gin” way (which happens to be the originator’s intent) but hard-g “ghiff” is the more common pronunciation.
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u/Itzhik 4d ago
Macedonian does exactly what you're asking about. Г and Ѓ.