william bright wrote:

>
> michael everson said:
>
> >No, of course not. PBF is accidental. If it were systematic, then
> >Latin would be featural.
>
> very true, but i can't resist pointing out that the tick which
> distinguishes G from C is in fact "featural" in origin, tho this doesn't
> mean that the roman alphabet should be considered featural.
>
> the point is, roughly, that the romans borrowed the alphabet from the
> etruscans, who had only voiceless stops P T C (C = [k]). but latin also had
> voiced stops [b d g], so they had to borrow letters from elsewhere. they
> got B D from greek, with a little modification of the latter; but for some

Every Etruscan abecedary includes the voiced consonants, even though
they weren't used in writing Etruscan.

> reason they didn't borrow greek gamma for [g]. Until around 230 BCE, the

Gamma was already busy being <C>.

> romans kept on writing [k] and [g] both as C. then a man named spurius
> carvilius ruga invented the letter G by adding a graphic "feature".
> nevertheless, as a deliberate archaism, the romans continued to abbreviate
> the personal names "gaius" and "gnaeus" as "C." and "CN." respectively.
> hence "gaius julius caesar" was written C. IVLIVS CAESAR.
>
> i've always thought that we should celebrate the birthday of spurius
> carvilius ruga, or put his picture on a postage stamp, or something - the
> man who invented "G"! i'm mortified to admit that his name was misprinted
> in WWS as "rufa". cheers; bill

Presumably it wasn't in May.

OCD2 doesn't include his third name; the source is Plutarch, Quaest.
Rom. 59. Does anyone have it handy? 11th Britannica says "he was
probably the first to spell his name RUGA rather than RUCA."
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...