In Latin it eventually took the ' c' form in Classical Latin. Already in the Western Greek alphabet, Gamma first took a ' ' form in Early Etruscan, then ' ' in Classical Etruscan. ![]() ![]() In the Etruscan language, plosive consonants had no contrastive voicing, so the Greek ' Γ' (Gamma) was adopted into the Etruscan alphabet to represent /k/. Powell, a specialist in the history of writing, states "It is hard to imagine how gimel = "camel" can be derived from the picture of a camel (it may show his hump, or his head and neck!)". Another possibility is that it depicted a camel, the Semitic name for which was gamal. The sign is possibly adapted from an Egyptian hieroglyph for a staff sling, which may have been the meaning of the name gimel.
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