THH 



ORGAN IZ 

 KNOWLEDGE- 



7, 



GDK 



STORY 

 AND' PICTURE 



Gg 



G, the seventh letter in the English alphabet, derived, 

 like almost all the others, from the Phoenician. The 

 name for it in that language was gimel, or gamel, which 

 meant that most important of all animals at the time, 

 __ the camel, and the letter itself was at first probably a 



rude picture of a camel. Later it was more and more 



carelessly drawn, until it looked much like the figure 7, and this symbol the Greeks, who 

 borrowed the letter and saw in it no relation to any animal, turned around (see C). 

 Their gamma, like the Phoenician gamel, had only the hard sound of G, as in go, but 

 the Romans when they borrowed it made it stand for that sound and the sound of hard c, 

 as well. The Romans also made it a curved letter, so that it looked like the modern C, 

 and gradually, as they distinguished between the two sounds it bore, they added a little 

 bar below the opening to show that one was G and one was C. 



In English the letter has two distinct sounds, the so-called soft sound as in gem, and 

 the hard, as in gave. Most commonly the hard sound is given before the vowels a, o 

 and u, as in gale, got, gull, and at the end of a word, as in big; the soft sound occurs 

 before c, i and y, as in gentle, gist. To this rule there are numerous exceptions. In 

 f _ _ __ music, G is the fifth tone in the major 

 C = 





scale of C. 



GABERS, ga'burz. See GHEBERS. 



GABLE, ga'b'l. When a building has a 

 "peaked" or sloping roof there is formed at 

 each end a triangle between the eaves and the 

 ridge of the roof. This triangular upper part 

 of the end wall is called a gable a name which 

 comes from an old Celtic word meaning fork. 

 In his poem of Evangeline Longfellow writes, 

 describing the picturesque homes of the Aca- 

 dian peasants: 



Thatched were the roofs, with dormer windows ; 



and gables projecting 

 Over the basement below protected and shaded 



the . doorway. 



Gables were extremely popular with medi- 

 eval builders, and in many old European cities 

 such as Brussels, Bruges, Antwerp, Louvain 

 and Nuremberg the traveler will still see 

 steep-roofed houses and town-halls that were 

 built during the fourteenth and fifteenth cen- 

 turies, their quaintly-ornamented gables' facing 

 the street instead of being at right angles to 

 it, as is the usual custom in our day. In the 



2357 



gables of Holland, Belgium and Germany espe- 

 cially, square indentations called corbie steps 

 were frequently cut into the sides of the tri- 



GABLE OF ELIZABETHAN PERIOD 



