2345: Digamma: Greek's Ghost Letter May 20, 2021

The letter G effectively replaced the letter Z in the Latin alphabet, but in the Greek alphabet the letter Ζ,ζ was also affected in its order in the alphabeta. The Hebrew and Phoenician letters, zayin, are both 7th and as numerals means (7) as is true in Greek numerals despite it being 6th in order. This is because the letter Ϛ,Ϝ known as Digamma which used to be 6th was used and eventually disfavored, merging with Sigma—namely the Lunate Sigma—creating the only Greek letter with 3 distinct forms (capital, lower case, and word-final). This had originally represented the sound /w/ which no longer exists in Greek.

2344: A History of G and Z May 19, 2021

The letter Z is pretty uncommon in English and at the very end of the alphabet, but this was not always the case. Much like in the Hebrew or Greek writing systems, this letter (or its equivalent) both are numerically 7th though now in Greek it is 6th in order. The elimination of Z was done deliberately by the Roman censor Appius Claudius who saw Z as a foreign letter even though this is only true insofar as Latin doesn't really use it; it was very much present through the creation of the alphabet. This was then replaced with the Roman-invented G now occupying the 7th position, with G being based off of C in form to represent that it is just the vocalized form. The use of the letter G to represent [d͡ʒ] (as in 'giraffe') is from French orthography.