Proto-Sinaitic/Proto-Canaanite The Proto-Sinaitic script, also known as Proto-Canaanite, is the alphabetic script of a number of Middle Bronze Age inscriptions in the Sinai, Middle Egypt, and Canaan. It is ancestral to the Semitic abjads as they developed by the Early Iron Age, and via Phoenician and Aramaic also to nearly all modern alphabets 19 c. BCE

Meroitic The Meroitic script is an alphabetic script originally derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs, used to write the Meroitic language of the Kingdom of Meroë/Kush. It was developed sometime during the Napatan Period , and first appears in the 2nd century BCE. For a time, it was also possibly used to write the Nubian language of the successor Nubian 3 c. BCE Ogham Ogham is an Early Medieval alphabet used primarily to write the Old Irish language, and occasionally the Brythonic language. Ogham is sometimes referred to as the "Celtic Tree Alphabet", based on a High Medieval Bríatharogam tradition ascribing names of trees to the individual letters 4 c. CE Hangul Hangul (pronounced /ˈhɑːŋɡʊl/; Korean: 한글 Hangeul/Han'gŭl [haːn.ɡɯl] (in South Korea)) or Chosongul (Korean pronunciation: [t͡ɕosʌnɡɯl]; Korean: 조선글 Chosŏn'gŭl/Joseongeul (in North Korea)) is the native alphabet of the Korean language, as distinguished from the logographic Sino-Korean hanja system. It was created in the 1443 Zhuyin Zhuyin Fuhao, often abbreviated zhuyin, and colloquially Bopomofo is a phonetic system for transcribing Chinese, especially Mandarin, for people learning to read, write or speak Mandarin. This semi-syllabary is currently in wide use in Taiwan . Consisting of 37 letters and 4 tone marks, it is a comprehensive system that can transcribe all the (Bopomofo) 1913 Complete writing systems genealogy Nearly all the worldwide segmental scripts -- which can loosely be described as "alphabets" -- appear to have derived from the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet. Also called the Middle Bronze Age alphabets due to their era of origin , Proto-Sinaitic first appeared in Canaan, Sinai and Egypt during the Middle Bronze Age, and were adapted from This box:

The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic An alphabet is a standardized set of letters — basic written symbols or graphemes — each of which roughly represents a phoneme in a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it was in the past. There are other systems, such as logographies, in which each character represents a word, morpheme, or semantic unit, and syllabaries, in which writing system Writing systems are distinguished from other possible symbolic communication systems in that one must usually understand something of the associated spoken language to comprehend the text. By contrast, other possible symbolic systems such as information signs, painting, maps and mathematics often do not require prior knowledge of a spoken language in the world today. It evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet The Greek alphabet is a set of twenty-four letters that has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BC. It is the first and oldest alphabet in the narrow sense that it notes each vowel and consonant with a separate symbol. It is as such in continuous use to this day. The letters were also used to represent called the Cumaean alphabet, which was borrowed and modified by the Etruscans Old Italic refers to several now extinct alphabet systems used on the Italian Peninsula in ancient times for various Indo-European languages and non-Indo-European (e.g. Etruscan) languages. The alphabets derive from the Euboean Greek Cumaean alphabet, used at Ischia and Cumae in the Bay of Naples in the eighth century BC who ruled early Rome, whose alphabet was then adapted and further modified by the ancient Romans Ancient Rome was a civilization that grew out of a small agricultural community founded on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 10th century BC. Located along the Mediterranean Sea, it became one of the largest empires in the ancient world to write the Latin language Latin or sometimes Roman is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Although often considered a dead language, in view of the fact that it has no native, fluent speakers, Latin continues to be taught in schools and has been, and currently is, used in the process of new word production in modern languages from many.

During the Middle Ages The Middle Ages is a period of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The period followed the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476, and preceded the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period in a three-period division of history: Classical, Medieval, and Modern. The term "Middle Ages" (medium aevum) was coined in, it was adapted to the Romance languages extinct: Anatolian · Paleo-Balkans (Dacian, , the direct descendants of Latin, as well as to the Celtic The Celtic languages are descended from Proto-Celtic, or "Common Celtic", a branch of the greater Indo-European language family. The term "Celtic" was used to describe this language group by Edward Lhuyd in 1707, having much earlier been used by Greek and Roman writers to describe tribes in central Gaul. During the 1st, Germanic, Baltic, and some Slavic languages, and finally to most of the languages of Europe.

With the age of colonialism and Christian evangelism, the Latin alphabet was spread overseas, and applied to Indigenous American, Indigenous Australian, Austronesian, East Asian, and African languages. More recently, western linguists have also tended to prefer the Latin alphabet or the International Phonetic Alphabet (itself largely based on the Latin alphabet) when transcribing or creating written standards for non-European languages, such as the African reference alphabet.

In modern usage, the term Latin alphabet is used for any direct derivation of the alphabet first used to write Latin. These variants may discard letters from the classical Roman script (like the Rotokas alphabet) or add new characters to it, as from the Danish and Norwegian alphabet. Letter shapes have changed over the centuries, including the creation of entirely new lower case characters.

Contents

History

Main article: History of the Latin alphabet

Origins

It is generally believed that the Romans adopted the Cumae alphabet‎, a variant of the Greek alphabet, in the 7th century B.C. from Cumae, a Greek colony in Southern Italy. (Gaius Julius Hyginus in Fab. 277 mentions 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 Ancient Greek alphabet was in turn based upon the Phoenician alphabet. From the Cumae alphabet, the Etruscan alphabet was derived and the Romans eventually adopted 21 of the original 26 Etruscan letters:

Archaic Latin alphabet
A B C D E F Z H I K L M N O P Q R S T V X

The letter C was the western form of the Greek gamma, but it was used for the sounds /ɡ/ and /k/ alike, possibly under the influence of Etruscan, which lacked any voiced plosives. Later, probably during the 3rd century BC, the letter Z — unneeded to write Latin proper — was replaced with the new letter G, a C modified with a small vertical stroke, which took its place in the alphabet. From then on, G represented the voiced plosive /ɡ/, while C was generally reserved for the voiceless plosive /k/. The letter K was used only rarely, in a small number of words such as Kalendae, often interchangeably with C.

After the Roman conquest of Greece in the first century BC, Latin adopted the Greek letters Y and Z (or readopted, in the latter case) to write Greek loanwords, placing them at the end of the alphabet. An attempt by the emperor Claudius to introduce three additional letters did not last. Thus it was that during the classical Latin period the Latin alphabet contained 23 letters:

Classical Latin alphabet
Letter A B C D E F G H
Name ā bē cē dē ē ef gē hā
Pronunciation (IPA) /aː/ /beː/ /keː/ /deː/ /eː/ /ef/ /geː/ /haː/
Letter I K L M N O P Q
Name ī kā el em en ō pē qū
Pronunciation (IPA) /iː/ /kaː/ /el/ /em/ /en/ /oː/ /peː/ /kʷuː/
Letter R S T V X Y Z
Name er es tē ū ex ī Graeca zēta
Pronunciation (IPA) /er/ /es/ /teː/ /uː/ /eks/ /iː ˈgrajka/ /ˈzeːta/
The Duenos inscription, dated to the 6th century BC, shows the earliest known forms of the Old Latin alphabet.

The Latin names of some of these letters are disputed. In general, however, the Romans did not use the traditional (Semitic-derived) names as in Greek: the names of the plosives were formed by adding /eː/ to their sound (except for K and Q, which needed different vowels to be distinguished from C) and the names of the continuants consisted either of the bare sound, or the sound preceded by /e/. The letter Y when introduced was probably called hy /hyː/ as in Greek, the name upsilon not being in use yet, but this was changed to i Graeca (Greek i) as Latin speakers had difficulty distinguishing its foreign sound /y/ from /i/. Z was given its Greek name, zeta. 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.

Old 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 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, but it probably existed earlier than that. It led to Uncial, a majuscule script commonly used from the 3rd to 8th centuries AD by Latin and Greek scribes.

New Roman cursive script, also known as minuscule cursive, was in use from the 3rd century to the 7th century, and uses letter forms that are more recognizable to modern eyes; a, b, d, and e had taken a more familiar shape, and the other letters were proportionate to each other. This script evolved into the medieval scripts known as Merovingian and Carolingian minuscule.

Medieval and later developments

Netherlands penny from 1553

It was not until the Middle Ages that the letter W (originally a ligature of V and V) was added to the Latin alphabet, to represent sounds from the Germanic languages which did not exist in medieval Latin, and only after the Renaissance did the convention of treating I and U as vowels, and J and V as consonants, become established. Prior to that, the former had been merely allographs of the latter.

With the fragmentation of political power, the style of writing changed and varied greatly throughout the Middle Ages, even after the invention of the printing press. Early deviations from the classical forms were the uncial script, a development of the Old Roman cursive, and various so-called minuscule scripts that developed from New Roman cursive, of which the Carolingian minuscule was the most influential, introducing the lower case forms of the letters, as well as other writing conventions that have since become standard.

The languages that use the Latin alphabet today generally use capital letters to begin paragraphs and sentences and 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 capitalized; whereas Modern English of the 18th century had frequently all nouns capitalized, in the same way that Modern German is written today, e.g. "Alle Schwestern der alten Stadt hatten die Vögel gesehen".

Spread

The Latin alphabet spread, along with the Latin language, from the Italian Peninsula to the lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea with the expansion of the Roman Empire. The eastern half of the Empire, including Greece, Asia Minor, the Levant, and Egypt, continued to use Greek as a lingua franca, but Latin was widely spoken in the western half, and as the western Romance languages evolved out of Latin, they continued to use and adapt the Latin alphabet.

With the spread of Western Christianity during the Middle Ages, the alphabet was gradually adopted by the peoples of northern Europe who spoke Celtic languages (displacing the Ogham alphabet) or Germanic languages (displacing earlier Runic alphabets), Baltic languages, as well as by the speakers of several Finno-Ugric languages, most notably Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian. The alphabet also came into use for writing the West Slavic languages and several South Slavic languages, as the people who spoke them adopted Roman Catholicism. The speakers of East Slavic languages generally adopted the Cyrillic alphabet along with Orthodox Christianity, despite that Latin alphabet has been actively used in Belarus in late Middle Ages and that there has always been a significant Roman Catholic minority in the country. The Serbian language uses both alphabets, with Latin being the predominant alphabet in the province of Vojvodina.

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 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.

Latin alphabet world distribution. The dark green areas shows the countries where this alphabet is the sole main script. The light green shows the countries where the alphabet co-exists with other scripts. Please note that the Latin alphabet is sometimes extensively used even in areas coloured grey due to use of unofficial second languages (e.g. French in Algeria or English in Egypt) and Latin transliterations of the official language (practised to some degree in most countries with a non-Latin alphabet).

Over the past 500 years, the Latin alphabet has spread around the world, to the Americas, Oceania, and parts of Asia, Africa, and the Pacific with European colonization, along with the Spanish, Portuguese, English, French, Swedish and Dutch languages. 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 languages, replacing earlier Arabic and indigenous Brahmic alphabets. Some glyph forms from the Latin alphabet served as the basis for the forms of the symbols in the Cherokee syllabary developed by Sequoyah; however, the sounds of the final syllabary were completely different. L. L. Zamenhof used the Latin alphabet as the basis for the alphabet of Esperanto. And the Latin alphabet was chosen for the Ido language due to its unquestionable international predominance of a global alphabet in most of the world's population.

In the late nineteenth century, the Romanians adopted the Latin alphabet, primarily because Romanian is a Romance language. The Romanians were predominantly Orthodox Christians, and their Church had promoted the Cyrillic alphabet prior to that.

Under French rule and Portuguese missionary influence, the Latin alphabet was adapted for writing the Vietnamese language, which had previously used Chinese-like characters.

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 Tartars, Bashkirs, Azeri, Kazakh, Kyrgyz and others, used the Latin-based Uniform Turkic alphabet in the 1930s, but 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, namely Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, as well as Romanian-speaking Moldova, have officially adopted the Latin alphabet for Azeri, Uzbek, Turkmen, Kazakh, Tatar, and Romanian respectively. Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and the breakaway region of Transnistria kept the Cyrillic alphabet, chiefly due to their close ties with Russia. In the same periods during the 1930s and 1940s, the majority of Kurds throughout the Kurdistan region replaced their use of the Arabic alphabet for writing in the Kurdish language by adopting two forms of the Latin alphabet.

Although today the only official Kurdish government located in Iraq uses the Arabic alphabet for public documents, the Latin alphabet remains widely used throughout the region by the majority of Kurdish-speakers.

Extensions

Main article: Latin-derived alphabets

In the course of its use, the Latin alphabet was adapted for use in new languages, sometimes representing phonemes not found in languages that were already written with the Roman characters. To represent these new sounds, extensions were therefore created, be it by adding diacritics to existing letters, by joining multiple letters together to make ligatures, by creating completely new forms, or by assigning a special function to pairs or triplets of letters. These new forms are given a place in the alphabet by defining an alphabetical order or collation sequence, which can vary with the particular language.

Ligatures

Main article: Ligature (typography)

A ligature is a fusion of two or more ordinary letters into a new glyph or character. Examples are Æ/æ (from AE, called "ash"), Œ/œ (from OE, sometimes called "oethel"), the abbreviation & (from Latin et "and"), and the German symbol ß ("sharp S" or eszet, from ſz or ſs, the archaic medial form of s, followed by a z or s).

Wholly new letters

Main article: List of Latin letters

Some examples of new letters to the standard Latin alphabet are the Runic letters wynn (Ƿ/ƿ) and thorn (Þ/þ), and the Irish letter eth (Ð/ð), which were added to the alphabet of Old English. Another Irish letter, the insular g, developed into yogh (Ȝ/ȝ), used in Middle English. Wynn was later replaced with the new letter w, eth and thorn with th, and yogh with gh. Although the four are no longer part of the English or Irish alphabets, eth and thorn are still used in the modern Icelandic alphabet and Faroese alphabet.

The Azerbaijani alphabet has adopted the letter schwa Ə/ə from the International Phonetic Alphabet, using it to represent the sound [æ]. Some West, Central and Southern African languages use a few additional letters which have a similar sound value to their equivalents in the IPA. For example, Adangme uses the letters Ɛ/ɛ and Ɔ/ɔ, and Ga uses Ɛ/ɛ, Ŋ/ŋ and Ɔ/ɔ. Hausa uses Ɓ/ɓ and Ɗ/ɗ for implosives, and Ƙ/ƙ for an ejective. Africanists have standardized these into the African reference alphabet.

Digraphs and trigraphs

Main articles: Digraph and Trigraph

A digraph is a pair of letters used to write one sound or a combination of sounds that does not correspond to the written letters in sequence. Examples are ch, rh, sh in English, or the Dutch ij (note that ij is capitalized as IJ or the ligature IJ and sometimes as the single letter Y despite it is a different letter, but never as Ij, and that it often takes the appearance of a ligature ij very similar to the letter ÿ in handwriting). A trigraph is made up of three letters, like the German sch, the Breton c’h or the Milanese oeu. In the orthographies of some languages, digraphs and trigraphs are regarded as independent letters of the alphabet in their own right. The capitalization of digraphs and trigraphs is language-dependent, as only on the first letter may be capitalized, or all component letters simultaneously even for words written in titlecase only where the other non-initial letters after the digraph or trigraph are left in lowercase.

Diacritics

The letter a with acute Diacritic. Main article: Diacritic

A diacritic, in some cases also called an accent, is a small symbol which can appear above or below a letter, or in some other position, such as the umlaut sign used in the German characters Ä, Ö, Ü. Its main function is to change the phonetic value of the letter to which it is added, but it may also modify the pronunciation of a whole syllable or word, or distinguish between homographs. As with letters, the value of diacritics is language-dependent.

Collation

Main article: Collating sequence

Modified letters such as the symbols Å, Ä, and Ö may be regarded as new individual letters in themselves, and assigned a specific place in the alphabet for collation purposes, separate from that of the letter on which they are based, as is done in Swedish. In other cases, such as with Ä, Ö, Ü in German, this is not done, letter-diacritic combinations being identified with their base letter. The same applies to digraphs and trigraphs. Different diacritics may be treated differently in collation within a single language. For example, in Spanish the character Ñ is considered a letter in its own, and sorted between N and O in dictionaries, but the accented vowels Á, É, Í, Ó, Ú are not separated from the unaccented vowels A, E, I, O, U.

Romanization

Main article: Romanization

Words from languages natively written with other scripts, such as Arabic or Chinese, are usually transliterated or transcribed when embedded in Latin text or in multilingual international communication, a process termed Romanization.

Whilst the Romanization of such languages is used mostly at unofficial levels, it has been especially prominent in computer messaging where only the limited 7-bit ASCII code is available on older systems. However, with the introduction of Unicode, Romanization is now becoming less necessary. Note that keyboards used to enter such text may still restrict users to Romanized text, as only ASCII or Latin-alphabet characters may be available.

English alphabet

Main article: English alphabet

As used in modern English, the Latin alphabet consists of the following characters

Majuscule Forms (also called uppercase or capital letters)
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Minuscule Forms (also called lowercase or small letters)
a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z

In addition, the ligatures Æ of A with E (e.g. "encyclopædia"), and Œ of O with E (e.g. "cœlacanth") may be used, optionally, in words derived from Latin or Greek, and the diaeresis mark is sometimes placed for example on the letters o and e (e.g. "coöperate" or "preëxisting") to indicate the pronunciation of oo or ee as two distinct vowels, rather than a long one. Hyphenation may also be used, to avoid having to type accented characters: "co-operate" or "pre-existing". Outside of professional papers on specific subjects that traditionally use ligatures in loanwords, however, ligatures and diaereses are seldom used in modern English. Note, however, that some fonts for typesetting English contain commonly used ligatures, such as for tt, fi, fl, ffi, and ffl. These are not independent letters, but rather allographs.

Latin alphabet and international standards

Main article: Basic modern Latin alphabet

By the 1960s it became apparent to the computer and telecommunications industries in the First World that a non-proprietary method of encoding characters was needed. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) encapsulated the Latin alphabet in their (ISO/IEC 646) standard. To achieve widespread acceptance, this encapsulation was based on popular usage. As the United States held a preeminent position in both industries during the 1960s the standard was based on the already published American Standard Code for Information Interchange, better known as ASCII, which included in the character set the 26 x 2 letters of the English alphabet. Later standards issued by the ISO, for example ISO/IEC 10646 (Unicode Latin), have continued to define the 26 x 2 letters of the English alphabet as the basic Latin alphabet with extensions to handle other letters in other languages.

The basic modern Latin alphabet
Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo Pp Qq Rr Ss Tt Uu Vv Ww Xx Yy Zz

history • palaeography • derivations • diacritics • punctuation • numerals • Unicode • list of letters • ISO/IEC 646

See also

Further reading

Writing systems
Overview History of writing · History of the alphabet · Graphemes · Scripts in Unicode
Lists Writing systems · Languages by writing system / by first written account · Undeciphered writing systems · Inventors of writing systems
Types Featural alphabets · Alphabets · Abjads · Alphasyllabaries / Abugidas · Syllabaries · Ideogrammic · Pictographic · Logographic · Numeral

Categories: Scripts with ISO 15924 four-letter codes | Latin alphabet | Typography

 

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Q. Particularly curious about the younger generation. Could they generally comprehend and be able to sound out the letters of the Roman alphabet?
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A. Of course they can. English education is mandatory here in Taiwan. "English is a common second language, with some large private schools providing English instruction. English is compulsory in students' curriculum once they enter elementary school. English as a school subject is also featured on Taiwan's education exams."
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