Insular G

Insular G (majuscule: Ᵹ, minuscule: ᵹ) is a form of the letter g somewhat resembling an ezh, used in the medieval insular script of Great Britain and Ireland. It was first used in the Roman Empire in Roman cursive, then it appeared in Irish half uncial (insular) script, and after it had passed into Old English, it developed into the Middle English letter yogh (Ȝ ȝ). Middle English, having reborrowed the familiar Carolingian g from the Continent, began to use the two forms of g as separate letters.

Insular G

Insular G on font lines

Carolingian G

Letter

Insular Gs written in Gaelic type in Newcastlewest, Ireland: "1926 – Árus na Gaeilge" (House of Irish)

The lowercase insular g (ᵹ) was used in Irish linguistics as a phonetic character for [ɣ], and on this basis is encoded in the Phonetic Extensions block of Unicode 4.1 (March 2005) as U+1D79. Its capital (Ᵹ) was introduced in Unicode 5.1 (April 2008) at U+A77D. The insular |g| is one of several insular letters encoded into Unicode for phonetics use.^[a] Few fonts will display all of the symbols, but more than a few will display the lowercase insular g (ᵹ) and the tironian et (⁊). Two fonts that support the other characters too are Junicode and Tehuti.

The relationship between different fonts, showing the development of the minuscule

Insular letters in Unicode[1][2]

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

A

B

C

D

E

F

U+1ACx

◌ᫌ

◌ᫍ

◌ᫎ

U+1D7x

ᵹ

U+1DDx

◌ᷘ

U+204x

⁊

U+2E5x

⹒

U+A77x

Ꝺ

ꝺ

Ꝼ

ꝼ

Ᵹ

Ꝿ

ꝿ

U+A78x

Ꞃ

ꞃ

Ꞅ

ꞅ

Ꞇ

ꞇ

U+A7Dx

Ꟑ

ꟑ

Notes 1.^ As of Unicode version 17.0 2.^ These characters are spread across the following Unicode blocks: Combining Diacritical Marks Extended (U+1AB0–U+1AFF), Phonetic Extensions (U+1D00–U+1D7F), Combining Diacritical Marks Supplement (U+1DC0–U+1DFF), General Punctuation (U+2000–U+206F), Supplemental Punctuation (U+2E00-U+2E7F), and Latin Extended-D (U+A720–U+A7FF)

Turned insular g

A turned version of insular g (Ꝿ ꝿ) was used by William Pryce to designate the velar nasal ŋ.^[1]

Notes

1. Gaelic type, used to write Irish and Scottish Gaelic, is a typeface that has glyphs for ⟨G⟩ and ⟨g⟩ that typically resemble the phonetics insulular g, but uses U+0047 G LATIN CAPITAL LETTER G and U+0067 g LATIN SMALL LETTER G, not U+1D79 ᵹ LATIN SMALL LETTER INSULAR G and U+A77D Ᵹ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER INSULAR G.