In its Proto-Canaanite form, the letter may have been named after a weapon that was either a staff sling or a throwing stick (spear thrower), ultimately deriving from a Proto-Sinaitic glyph based on the hieroglyph below: The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek gamma (Γ), the Latin C, G, Ɣ and Ȝ, and the Cyrillic Г, Ґ, and Ғ.
It is pronounced as a fricative [ʒ] in most of Northern Africa and the Levant, and [ɡ] is the prestigious and most common pronunciation in Egypt, which is also found in Southern Arabian Peninsula.
Differences in pronunciation occur because readers of Modern Standard Arabic pronounce words following their native dialects.
However, ج may be used in Egypt to transcribe /ʒ~d͡ʒ/ (normally pronounced [ʒ]) or if there is a need to distinguish them completely, then چ is used to represent /ʒ/, which is also a proposal for Mehri and Soqotri languages.
While in most Semitic languages, e.g. Aramaic, Hebrew, Ge'ez, Old South Arabian the equivalent letter represents a [ɡ], Arabic is considered unique among them where the Jīm ⟨ج⟩ was palatalized to an affricate [d͡ʒ] or a fricative [ʒ] in most dialects from classical times.
While there is variation in Modern Arabic varieties, most of them reflect this palatalized pronunciation except in coastal Yemeni and Omani dialects as well as in Egypt, where it is pronounced [g].
It is thus written as: Hebrew spelling: גִּימֶל Bertrand Russell posits that the letter's form is a conventionalized image of a camel.
Three of them (bet, kaph, and pe) have their sound value changed in modern Hebrew from the fricative to the plosive by adding a dagesh.
The letter, renamed Jamal/Jomal, is written with a tilde/tie either below or within it to represent the borrowed phoneme [d͡ʒ] (ܓ̰ܡܵܠ), which is used in Garshuni and some Neo-Aramaic languages to write loan and foreign words from Arabic or Persian.