[romulanholiday]

while we’re talking about the formulation of the modern alphabet (we’re not) (i know) (shhh) G is actually really interesting: originally there was only a C, which occasionally made ‘guh’ sounds; the little tail on the front of an uppercase G was added to differentiate between the two. But both come from gimel and were at one point the same letter.

having ‘guh’ and ‘kuh’ represented by the same letter may seem odd, but say ‘kuh’ and ‘guh’ in close succession and you’ll notice they use the same parts of the mouth. it’s no more odd than having ‘juh’ and ‘guh’ be represented by the same letter. and in ‘kuh’ and ‘guh’s case, they’re actually much closer phonetically. this is why, for example, ‘kuh’ and ‘guh’ noises are closely related in japanese phonetics: ku く becomes gu ぐ with just a few more strokes. the roman alphabet basically did the same thing, if you think about it: we just added a stroke to the bottom of the C, and now it’s a G.

usually i am against the general inclination to romanticize language— i hate the idea that language is all ~~interconnected~ as if the cavepeople of our past knew some secret history and encoded it in proto indo eurpoean. however, i do think it is pretty cool that, entirely by accident, the roman alphabet ended up doing the same thing as a completely different syllabary for an entirely disparate language. this is not because we’re all ~*~connected~ or whatever, but because it’s efficient. which is, if you’re into the beauty of pragmatism like i am, much more meaningful: if we are all connected, we’re connected through a combination of ingenuity, laziness, and expediency.