Spurius Carvilius Ruga (possibly 230 BC) was a freedman living in Rome who allegedly invented the letter G. His invention would have been quickly adopted in the Roman Republic because the letter C was, at the time, confusingly used both for the /k/ and /g/ sounds. Ruga was also the first man in recorded history to open a private elementary school.

Plutarch is our only source for the second invention, and Quintus Terentius Scaurus confirms the first one in De Orthographia. The letter G was already in use before 230 BC; Wilhelm Paul Corssen theorized in Über Aussprache that what Plutarch really meant was that Ruga's elementary school was the first place to assign the C and G to their current phonemes of /k/ and /g/. G was imported from the Greek zeta, which stood for quite a different sound, and usually confused with C and Z. This is the reason G is in the middle of the alphabet rather than at the end; at whatever point the confusion was stamped out, probably Ruga's doing, it replaced the Z used in the Old Italic alphabet.


Ohne Spurius Carvilius Ruga würde nichts grooven oder geil sein! Zu diesem Mann gibt es ausserdem keinen deutschen Wikipedia-Artikel.

Quelle