Amazing Ancestors at paulcarvill.com, the home of Paul Carvill on the web

At the weekend I was reading The Art of Looking Sideways by Alan Fletcher. It’s ostensibly a graphic design book, a “guide to visual awareness”, but it’s also so much more than that. It’s full of incredible and inspiring ideas information, making it perfect for those times when, like Carole King, you feel so uninspired. It’s also the size of a large encyclopaedia and weighs a ton.

I flipped it open at random, as usual, and the page I was reading was about the origins of the alphabet. It turns out that the wonderfully named Spurius Carvilius Ruga invented the letter G:

But C also had the sound of g and, since gamma already represented k, a new letter was added to distinguish between these two values. Plutarch (Quaestiones Romanae, 54, 59) attributes its introduction (in the third century BC) to Spurius Carvilius Ruga, a freedman whose grammar school was the first to charge a fee (he also was the first Roman to divorce his wife). The letter continued to represent the sound of k but, by adding a stroke to C, Carvilius created the letter G to denote that sound. Its older value survived, however, in the abbreviations for Gaius (C.) and Gnaeus (Cn.). The seventh letter in the Latin alphabet, G took the position originally held by Z (zeta), which had no equivalent value in Latin and was discarded.

I hope to find out more on this amazing ancestor of mine.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 11th, 2005 at 12:57 pm and is filed under Family. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.