Voiced postalveolar fricative

When Norman French crossed the Channel in 1066, it brought a whole set of G sounds that were foreign to English speakers.

French used G before I or E as a palatalized /dʒ/ or /ʒ/, and English borrowed that pattern.

That explains why we have both giant and garden, with the first soft and the second hard.

Scribes in medieval England added a silent E at word endings to signal a soft G before it.

But in mainstream standard English, we still rely on orthography to guide pronunciation rather than phonological rules.

Latin introduced a hard G before all vowels, but when it borrowed into English, the soft G survived in certain forms.

For example, gene comes from Greek via Latin, keeping the soft /dʒ/ sound.

Conversely, gravity preserves the hard G because its roots stayed in Latin before English adoption.