The Latin script is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world.[1] It is the standard script of the English language and is often referred to simply as "the alphabet" in English. It is a true alphabet which originated in the 7th century BC in Italy and has changed continually over the last 2,500 years. It has roots in the Semitic alphabet and its offshoot alphabets, the Phoenician, Greek, and Etruscan. The phonetic values of some letters changed, some letters were lost and gained, and several writing styles ("hands") developed. Two such styles, the minuscule and majuscule hands, were combined into one script with alternate forms for the lower and upper case letters. Modern uppercase letters differ only slightly from their classical counterparts, and there are few regional variants.
The Latin alphabet started out as uppercase serifed letters known as Roman square capitals. The lowercase letters evolved through cursive styles that developed to adapt the inscribed alphabet to being written with a pen. Over the ages many dissimilar stylistic forms of each letter evolved but, when not becoming a recognised subform to transliterate exotic tongues, denoted the same letter. After the evolution from the Western Greek Alphabet through Old Italic alphabet, G developed from C, the consonantal I (namely J) from a flourished I, V and U split likewise and the Germanic-centred ligature of VV became W, the letter thorn Þ was introduced from the runic alphabet but was lost in all except Icelandic, and s would be normally written as a long s (ſ), and when coming before z, it formed the ligature ß, which has survived in German to this day as a separate letter. S would settle as it appears today a terminal s (as it always had been at a word's end) after the 7th century AD – the internal forms were widely deprecated by the 19th century.
However, thanks to classical revival, Roman capitals were reintroduced by humanists making old Latin inscriptions easily legible while many medieval manuscripts are unreadable to an untrained modern reader, due to unfamiliar letterforms, narrow spacing and abbreviation marks save for the apostrophe and Carolingian minuscule letters (lower caps).
Phonetic value of some letters has changed in live languages whether or not from Latin origins, each seeing diverse softenings, drifts or phonetic complications such as in Italian, English, Dutch and French. Vowels have also evolved with notably great vowel shifts in English and Portuguese. Orthography does not fully match phonetics – an illustration being that ⟨o⟩ became used rather than ⟨u⟩ when before i, m, n, v, w for legibility, namely to avoid a succession of vertical strokes, in English.[2] Within each language there are homophonic heterographs (words written differently but sounding the same) and the adoption of digraphs for new sounds, such as ⟨sh⟩ for the voiceless postalveolar fricative in English, being ⟨ch⟩ in French, yet ⟨ch⟩ in Italian denotes k or the very basic words that began qu and their derivations. A theme for digraphs is widespread use of h as a second letter, avoiding diacritics onto, under, or over the first letter (unavailable in most basic printing presses) as in Romance languages h is usually a voiceless remnant.
It is generally held that the Latins derived their alphabet from the Etruscan alphabet. The Etruscans, in turn, derived their alphabet from the Greek colony of Cumae in Italy, who used a Western variant of the Greek alphabet, which was in turn derived from the Phoenician alphabet, itself derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs. The Latins ultimately adopted 21 of the original 26 Etruscan letters.
Legendary origin account in Hyginus
Gaius Julius Hyginus, who recorded much Roman mythology, mentions in Fab. 277 the legend that it was Carmenta, the Cimmerian Sibyl, who altered fifteen letters of the Greek alphabet to become the Latin alphabet, which her son Evander introduced into Latium, supposedly 60 years before the Trojan War, but there is no historically sound basis to this tale.
The Parcae, Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos invented seven Greek letters– A B H T I Y. Others say that Mercury invented them from the flight of cranes, which, when they fly, form letters. Palamedes, too, son of Nauplius, invented eleven letters; Simonides, too, invented four letters– Ó E Z PH; Epicharmus of Sicily, two– P and PS. The Greek letters Mercury is said to have brought to Egypt, and from Egypt Cadmus took them to Greece. Cadmus in exile from Arcadia, took them to Italy, and his mother Carmenta changed them to Latin to the number of 15. Apollo on the lyre added the rest.[3]
Ultimate derivation from Egyptian hieroglyphs
Below is a table synoptically showing selected Proto-Sinaitic signs and the proposed correspondences with Phoenician letters. Also shown are the sound values, names, and descendants of the Phoenician letters.[4]
Possible correspondences between Hieroglyphs, Phoenician and Latin alphabets
The oldest Latin inscriptions do not distinguish between /ɡ/ and /k/, represented both by C, K and Q according to position. This is explained by the fact that the Etruscan language did not make this distinction. K was used before A; Q was used (if at all) before O or V; C was used elsewhere. C derived from Greek Gamma (Γ) and Q from Greek Koppa (Ϙ). In later Latin, K survived only in a few forms such as Kalendae; Q survived only before V (representing /kw/), and C was used everywhere else. G was later invented to distinguish between /ɡ/ and /k/; it was originally simply a C with an additional stroke.
K was marginalized in favour of C, which afterward stood for both /ɡ/ and /k/.
Probably during the 3rd century BC, the Z was dropped and a new letter G was placed in its position– according to Plutarch, by Spurius Carvilius Ruga– so that afterward, C = /k/, G = /ɡ/.
Old Latin could be written from right to left (as were Etruscan and early Greek) or boustrophedon, while writing after the first century BC was almost always left-to-right.[5]
Old Latin alphabet, in the modern equivalent letters
Two carvings in San Pietro in Vincoli, Rome. The lower dates to the 4th century AD, with letters in a Roman cursive style and no spaces between words.
An attempt by the emperor Claudius to introduce three additional letters was short-lived, but after the conquest of Greece in the 1st century BC the letters Y and Z were, respectively, adopted and readopted from the Greek alphabet and placed at the end. Now the new Latin alphabet contained 23[6] letters:
The Latin names of some of the letters are disputed. In general, however, the Romans did not use the traditional (Semitic-derived) names as in Greek, but adopted the simplified names of the Etruscans, which derived from saying the sounds of the letters: the vowels stood for themselves, the names of the stop consonant letters were formed by adding the neutral vowel e, which in Latin became /eː/ (except for K and Q, which were distinguished from C by appending the vowel which followed them in Etruscan orthography), and the names of the continuant consonants were formed by preceded the sound with /e/. X was named /eks/ rather than /kseː/, as /ks/ could not begin a word in Latin (and possibly Etruscan). When the letter Y was introduced into Latin, it was probably called hy/hyː/ as in Greek (the name upsilon being not yet in use), but was changed to i Graeca ("Greek i") as Latin speakers had difficulty distinguishing the sounds /i/ and /y/. Z was given its Greek name, zeta, when it was borrowed.[7] For the Latin sounds represented by the various letters see Latin spelling and pronunciation; for the names of the letters in English see English alphabet and for the sounds in English see English phonetics.
Roman cursive script, also called majuscule cursive and capitalis cursive, was the everyday form of handwriting used for writing letters, by merchants writing business accounts, by schoolchildren learning the Latin alphabet, and even by emperors issuing commands. A more formal style of writing was based on Roman square capitals, but cursive was used for quicker, informal writing. It was most commonly used from about the 1st century BC to the 3rd century AD, but it probably existed earlier than that.
De chalcographiae inventione (1541, Mainz) with the 23 letters. W, U and J are missing.Jeton from Nuremberg, c. 1553, with 24 letters, W is included.
The lower case (minuscule) letters developed in the Middle Ages from New Roman Cursive writing, first as the uncial script, and later as minuscule script. The old Roman letters were retained for formal inscriptions and for emphasis in written documents. The languages that use the Latin alphabet generally use capital letters to begin paragraphs and sentences and for proper nouns. The rules for capitalization have changed over time, and different languages have varied in their rules for capitalization. Old English, for example, was rarely written with even proper nouns capitalised; whereas Modern English of the 18th century had frequently all nouns capitalised, in the same way that Modern German is today.
The use of the letters I and V for both consonants and vowels proved inconvenient as the Latin alphabet was adapted to Germanic and Romance languages. W originated as a doubled V (VV) used to represent the sound [w] found in Old English as early as the 7th century. It came into common use in the later 11th century, replacing the runic Wynn letter which had been used for the same sound. In the Romance languages, the minuscule form of V was a rounded u; from this was derived a rounded capital U for the vowel in the 16th century, while a new, pointed minuscule v was derived from V for the consonant. In the case of I, a word-final swash form, j, came to be used for the consonant, with the un-swashed form restricted to vowel use. Such conventions were erratic for centuries. J was introduced into English for the consonant in the 17th century (being rare as a vowel), but it was not universally considered a distinct letter in the alphabetic order until the 19th century.
The names of the letters were largely unchanged, with the exception of H. As the sound /h/ disappeared from the Romance languages, the original Latin name hā became difficult to distinguish from A. Emphatic forms such as [aha] and [axxa] were used, developing eventually into acca, the direct ancestor of English aitch.[8]
Simplified relationship between various scripts leading to the development of modern lower case of the standard Latin alphabet and that of the modern variants, Fraktur (used in Germany until recently) and Gaelic (Ireland). Several scripts coexisted such as half-uncial and uncial, which derive from Roman cursive and Greek uncial, and Visigothic, Merovingian (Luxeuil variant here) and Beneventan. The Carolingian script was the basis for blackletter and humanist. What is commonly called "Gothic writing" is technically called blackletter (here Textualis quadrata), and is completely unrelated to Visigothic script. The letter j is i with a flourish; u and v are the same letter in early scripts and varied according to position in insular half-uncial and caroline minuscule and later scripts; W is a ligature of vv; in Anglo-Saxon insular the runewynn is used as a w and thorn (þ) for th. A dot was adopted for i only after late-caroline (protogothic), and in Beneventan script the macron abbreviation featured a dot above. Lost variants such as r rotunda, ligatures and scribal abbreviation marks are omitted, long s is shown when no terminal s (surviving variant) is present. Humanist script was the basis for venetian types which changed little until today, such as Times New Roman (a serif typeface).
With the spread of printing, several styles of Latin typography emerged with typefaces based on various minuscules of the Middle Ages depending on the region. In Germany, starting with Johannes Gutenberg the commonly used typefaces were based on blackletter scripts, a tradition that lasted until the 20th century, an example of the later typefaces used is fraktur.
In Italy, due to the revival of classical culture, the heavy gothic styles were soon displaced by Venetian Latin types, also called antiqua, which were based on the inscriptional capitals on Roman buildings and monuments. However, humanist scholars of the early 15th century mistook Carolingian minuscule as the authentic writing style of the Romans and redesigned the small Carolingian letter, lengthening ascenders and descenders, and adding incised serifs and finishing strokes to integrate them with the Roman capitals. By the time moveable type reached Italy several decades later, the humanistic writing had evolved into a consistent model known as humanistic minuscule, which served as the basis for Venetian typeface.
In addition to the aforementioned square capitals used in architecture, in the Roman empire and in the Middle Ages for rapidly written vernacular documents roman cursive or even a form of shorthand, called tironian notes, were used.
Whereas the meticulously drawn textualis quadrata was the most common script for religious works, starting from the 13th century a common style of handwriting for vernacular work, which were written at speed, was secretary hand, a cursive script, which features amongst several ligatures and contraction distinctive strong "elephant's ear" ascenders and descenders[9]
In the 16th–17th centuries secretary hand was slowly replaced by italic scripts, a semi-cursive group of scripts. Early italic hand, dating from the 15th century, was based on humanist minuscule with pronounced serifs, a single story a, open tailed g, slight forward slope and in the late renaissance could have been written with flourishes and swashes. Italic hand developed into Cancelleresca (chancery) corsiva (also an italic script) used for Vatican documents from the middle of the 16th century, which featured a more prominent slope and lavish swashes (often curled) on capitals.
Additionally this script led to the italic type in typography, which could be used within a text written in Roman type (e.g. "The taxonomic name of the red fox is Vulpes vulpes") and thanks to Edward Johnston this script has enjoyed a revival in the 20th century.
Note: "Italic hand" (a semi-cursive script), "Italian hand" (a copperplate cursive script) and "Italic type" (a typeface) are different concepts.
From the italic scripts after the 16th century, more cursive forms evolved, known as Copperplate script due to way the calligraphy books were printed. These scripts reached their height in the 18–19th century. The main examples were the Italian hand and the English round-hand, which in Britain were taught to men and women respectively, these scripts feature flowing letters which could be written with a single pen lift (with the exception of x and the marks added after writing the word which were dots on i and j and the bar of the ascender of t) with straight or looped ascenders and descenders. In Italy, Italian hand is instead known as "posata" (posed).
Several national styles of cursive were developed, such as Spencerian Script in the US. Despite the recent decline, in several countries cursive scripts are still taught in schools today[example needed], often modified to be more similar to roman type letters (tailless z, w-like instead of a 90° CW turned s for w, capitals without "belly" or swashes, forward-facing capital F etc.).
As late as 1492, the Latin alphabet was limited primarily to the languages spoken in western, northern and central Europe. The Orthodox Christian Slavs of eastern and southeastern Europe mostly used the Cyrillic alphabet, and the Greek alphabet was still in use by Greek-speakers around the eastern Mediterranean. The Arabic alphabet was widespread within Islam, both among Arabs and non-Arab nations like the Iranians, Indonesians, Malays, and Turkic peoples. Most of the rest of Asia used a variety of Brahmic alphabets or the Chinese script.
World distribution of the Latin alphabet. The blue areas show the countries where the Latin alphabet is the sole official script or most predominant writing system.
By the 18th century, the standard Latin alphabet, cemented by the rise of the printing press, comprised the 26 letters we are familiar with today, albeit in Romance languages the letter ⟨w⟩ was until the 19th century very rare.
In the late 18th century, the Romanians adopted the Latin alphabet; although Romanian is a Romance language, the Romanians were predominantly Orthodox Christians, and until the 19th century the Church used the Romanian Cyrillic alphabet. Vietnam, under French rule, adapted the Latin alphabet for Vietnamese, which had previously used Chinese characters. The Latin alphabet is also used for many Austronesian languages, including Tagalog and the other languages of the Philippines, and the official Malaysian and Indonesian, replacing earlier Arabic and Brahmic scripts.
In 1928, as part of Kemal Atatürk's reforms, Turkey adopted the Latin alphabet for the Turkish language, replacing the Arabic alphabet. Most of Turkic-speaking peoples of the former USSR, including Tatars, Bashkirs, Azeri, Kazakh, Kyrgyz and others, used the Uniform Turkic alphabet in the 1930s. In the 1940s all those alphabets were replaced by Cyrillic. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, several of the newly independent Turkic-speaking republics adopted the Latin alphabet, replacing Cyrillic. Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan have officially adopted the Latin alphabet for Azeri, Uzbek, and Turkmen, respectively. In the 1970s, the People's Republic of China developed an official transliteration of Mandarin Chinese into the Latin alphabet, called Pinyin, used to aid children and foreigners in learning the pronunciation of Chinese characters. Aside from that, Chinese characters are used for reading and writing.
West Slavic and some South Slavic languages use the Latin alphabet rather than the Cyrillic, a reflection of the dominant religion practiced among those peoples. Among these, Polish uses a variety of diacritics and digraphs to represent special phonetic values, as well as l with stroke– ł– for a w-like sound. Czech uses diacritics as in Dvořák– the term háček ("little hook") is Czech. Croatian and the Latin version of Serbian use carons, or háčeks, in č, š, ž, an acute in ć and a bar in đ. The languages of Eastern Orthodox Slavs generally use Cyrillic instead which is much closer to the Greek alphabet. Serbian, however, actively uses both alphabets.
A, or a, is the first letter and the first vowel letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, and others worldwide. Its name in English is a, plural aes.
An alphabet is a standard set of letters written to represent particular sounds in a spoken language. Specifically, letters correspond to phonemes, the categories of sounds that can distinguish one word from another in a given language. Not all writing systems represent language in this way: a syllabary assigns symbols to spoken syllables, while logographies assign symbols to words, morphemes, or other semantic units.
The Latin alphabet, also known as the Roman alphabet, is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of additions and extensions, it forms the Latin script that is used to write many modern European languages, including English and many modern Asian languages, including Malay, Indonesian and Modern Standard Syloti (MSS). With modifications, it is also used for other alphabets, such as the Vietnamese alphabet. Its modern repertoire is standardised as the ISO basic Latin alphabet.
M, or m, is the thirteenth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is em, plural ems.
R, or r, is the eighteenth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ar, plural ars, or in Ireland or.
S, or s, is the nineteenth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ess, plural esses.
Penmanship is the technique of writing with the hand using a writing instrument. Today, this is most commonly done with a pen, or pencil, but throughout history has included many different implements. The various generic and formal historical styles of writing are called "hands" while an individual's style of penmanship is referred to as "handwriting".
The Phoenician alphabet is a consonantal alphabet used across the Mediterranean civilization of Phoenicia for most of the 1st millennium BCE. It was the first mature alphabet, and attested in Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions found across the Mediterranean region. In the history of writing systems, the Phoenician script also marked the first to have a fixed writing direction—while previous systems were multi-directional, Phoenician was written horizontally, from right to left. It developed directly from the Proto-Sinaitic script used during the Late Bronze Age, which was derived in turn from Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Cursive is any style of penmanship in which characters are written joined in a flowing manner, generally for the purpose of making writing faster, in contrast to block letters. It varies in functionality and modern-day usage across languages and regions; being used both publicly in artistic and formal documents as well as in private communication. Formal cursive is generally joined, but casual cursive is a combination of joins and pen lifts. The writing style can be further divided as "looped", "italic", or "connected".
The Cyrillic I is a letter used in almost all Cyrillic alphabets with the exception of Belarusian.
The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BC. It is derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and was the earliest known alphabetic script to have distinct letters for vowels as well as consonants. In Archaic and early Classical times, the Greek alphabet existed in many local variants, but, by the end of the 4th century BC, the Euclidean alphabet, with 24 letters, ordered from alpha to omega, had become standard and it is this version that is still used for Greek writing today.
Little yus and big yus, or jus, are letters of the Cyrillic script representing two Common Slavonic nasal vowels in the early Cyrillic and Glagolitic alphabets. Each can occur in iotated form, formed as ligatures with the decimal i (І). Other yus letters are blended yus (Ꙛ ꙛ), closed little yus (Ꙙ ꙙ) and iotated closed little yus (Ꙝ ꙝ).
The Faliscan language is the extinct Italic language of the ancient Falisci, who lived in Southern Etruria. Together with Latin, it formed the Latino-Faliscan languages group of the Italic languages. It seems probable that the language persisted, being gradually permeated with Latin, until at least 150 BC.
The Ukrainian alphabet is the set of letters used to write Ukrainian, which is the official language of Ukraine. It is one of several national variations of the Cyrillic script. It comes from the Cyrillic script, which was devised in the 9th century for the first Slavic literary language, called Old Slavonic. In the 10th century, it became used in Kievan Rus' to write Old East Slavic, from which the Belarusian, Russian, Rusyn, and Ukrainian alphabets later evolved. The modern Ukrainian alphabet has 33 letters in total: 21 consonants, 1 semivowel, 10 vowels and 1 palatalization sign. Sometimes the apostrophe (') is also included, which has a phonetic meaning and is a mandatory sign in writing, but is not considered as a letter and is not included in the alphabet.
Heth, sometimes written Chet or Ḥet, is the eighth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician ḥēt 𐤇, Hebrew ḥēt ח, Aramaic ḥēṯ 𐡇, Syriac ḥēṯ ܚ, and Arabic ḥāʾ ح.
The history of the alphabet goes back to the consonantal writing system used to write Semitic languages in the Levant during the 2nd millennium BCE. Nearly all alphabetic scripts used throughout the world today ultimately go back to this Semitic script. Its first origins can be traced back to a Proto-Sinaitic script developed in Ancient Egypt to represent the language of Semitic-speaking workers and slaves in Egypt. Unskilled in the complex hieroglyphic system used to write the Egyptian language, which required a large number of pictograms, they selected a small number of those commonly seen in their surroundings to describe the sounds, as opposed to the semantic values, of their own Canaanite language. This script was partly influenced by the older Egyptian hieratic, a cursive script related to Egyptian hieroglyphs. The Semitic alphabet became the ancestor of multiple writing systems across the Middle East, Europe, northern Africa, and Pakistan, mainly through Ancient South Arabian, Phoenician and the closely related Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, and later Aramaic and the Nabatean—derived from the Aramaic alphabet and developed into the Arabic alphabet—five closely related members of the Semitic family of scripts that were in use during the early first millennium BCE.
The history of the Greek alphabet starts with the adoption of Phoenician letter forms in the 9th–8th centuries BC during early Archaic Greece and continues to the present day. The Greek alphabet was developed during the Iron Age, centuries after the loss of Linear B, the syllabic script that was used for writing Mycenaean Greek until the Late Bronze Age collapse and Greek Dark Age. This article concentrates on the development of the alphabet before the modern codification of the standard Greek alphabet.
The Latin script, also known as the Roman script, and technically Latin writing system is an alphabetic writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae, in southern Italy. The Greek alphabet was altered by the Etruscans, and subsequently their alphabet was altered by the Romans. Several Latin-script alphabets exist, which differ in graphemes, collation and phonetic values from the classical Latin alphabet.
Many local variants of the Greek alphabet were employed in ancient Greece during the archaic and early classical periods, until around 400 BC, when they were replaced by the classical 24-letter alphabet that is the standard today. All forms of the Greek alphabet were originally based on the shared inventory of the 22 symbols of the Phoenician alphabet, with the exception of the letter Samekh, whose Greek counterpart Xi (Ξ) was used only in a sub-group of Greek alphabets, and with the common addition of Upsilon (Υ) for the vowel. The local, so-called epichoric, alphabets differed in many ways: in the use of the consonant symbols Χ, Φ and Ψ; in the use of the innovative long vowel letters, in the absence or presence of Η in its original consonant function ; in the use or non-use of certain archaic letters ; and in many details of the individual shapes of each letter. The system now familiar as the standard 24-letter Greek alphabet was originally the regional variant of the Ionian cities in Anatolia. It was officially adopted in Athens in 403 BC and in most of the rest of the Greek world by the middle of the 4th century BC.
B, or b, is the second letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is bee, plural bees.
Figure Two: "Representative selection of proto-Sinaitic characters with comparison to Egyptian hieroglyphs" (p.38),
Figure Three: "Chart of all early proto-Canaanite letters with comparison to proto-Sinaitic signs" (p.39),
Figure Four: "Representative selection of later proto-Canaanite letters with comparison to early proto-Canaanite and proto-Sinaitic signs" (p.40).
See also: Goldwasser (2010), following Albright (1966), "Schematic Table of Proto-Sinaitic Characters" (fig. 1). A comparison of glyphs from western ("Proto-Canaanite", Byblos) and southern scripts along with the reconstructed "Linear Ugaritic" (Lundin 1987) is found in Manfried Dietrich and Oswald Loretz, Die Keilalphabete: die phönizisch-kanaanäischen und altarabischen Alphabete in Ugarit, Ugarit-Verlag, 1988, p. 102, reprinted in Wilfred G. E. Watson, Nicolas Wyatt (eds.), Handbook of Ugaritic Studies (1999), p. 86.
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