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Latin alphabet

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Linguistics

   Latin alphabet
   Type: Alphabet
   Languages: Latin and Romance languages; most languages of Europe;
   Romanizations exist for practically all known languages.
   Time period: ~700 B.C. to the present
   Parent writing systems: Proto-Canaanite alphabet
     Phoenician alphabet
      Greek alphabet
       Old Italic alphabet
       Latin alphabet
   Sister writing systems: Cyrillic
   Coptic
   Runic/Futhark
   Unicode range: See Unicode Latin
   ISO 15924 code: Latn

   Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA
   chart for English for an English-​based pronunciation key.

                                                   History of the Alphabet

                                          Middle Bronze Age 19–15th c. BC
      * Canaanite- Phoenician 14th c. BC
           + Paleo-Hebrew 10th c. BC
           + Aramaic 9th c. BC
                o Brāhmī & Indic 6th c. BC
                     # Tibetan 7th c.
                     # Khmer/ Javanese 9th c.
                o Hebrew 3rd c. BC
                o Syriac 2nd c. BC
                     # Nabatean 2nd c. BC
                          @ Arabic 4th c.
                o Avestan 4th to 6th c.
           + Greek 9th c. BC
                o Etruscan 8th c. BC
                     # Latin 7th c. BC
                     # Runes 2nd c.
                     # Ogham 4th c.
                o Gothic 4th c.
                o Armenian 405
                o Glagolitic 862
                o Cyrillic 10th c.
           + Samaritan 6th c. BC
           + Iberian 6th c. BC
      * Epigraphic South Arabian 9th c. BC
           + Ge'ez 5–6th c. BC

                                                        Meroitic 3rd c. BC
                                                        Complete genealogy

   The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely
   used alphabetic writing system in the world today. Apart from Latin
   itself, the alphabet was adapted to the direct descendants of Latin
   (the Romance languages), Germanic, Celtic and some Slavic languages
   from the Middle Ages, and finally to most languages of Europe. With the
   age of colonialism and Christian proselytism, the alphabet was spread
   overseas, and applied to Austronesian languages, Vietnamese, Hausa,
   Swahili, Tagalog and many others.

   In modern usage, the term Latin alphabet is used for any
   straightforward derivation of the alphabet used by the Romans. These
   variants may drop letters (e.g. the Italian alphabet) or add letters
   (e.g. the Danish alphabet) to or from the classical Roman script, and
   of course many letter shapes have changed over the centuries — such as
   the lower-case letters which the Romans would not have recognized. The
   Latin alphabet evolved from the Greek alphabet which is based upon the
   Phoenician alphabet.

Evolution

                         CAPTION: Original Latin alphabet of the 7th c. BC

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

   It is generally held that the Latins adopted the western variant of the
   Greek alphabet in the 7th century BC from Cumae, a Greek colony in
   southern Italy. Roman legend credited the introduction to one Evander,
   son of the Sibyl, supposedly 60 years before the Trojan war, but there
   is no historically sound basis to this tale. From the Cumae alphabet,
   the Etruscan alphabet was derived and the Latins finally adopted 21 of
   the original 26 Etruscan letters.

   Later, probably during the 3rd century BC, the Z was dropped and a new
   letter G was placed in its position. An attempt by the emperor Claudius
   to introduce three additional letters was short-lived, but after the
   conquest of Greece in the first century BC the letters Y and Z were,
   respectively, adopted and readopted from the Greek alphabet and placed
   at the end. Now during the classical Latin period, the alphabet
   contained 23 letters:
   Letter A B C D E F G H I K L M N
   Latin name ā bē cē dē ē ef gē hā ī kā el em en
   Latin pronunciation ( IPA) /aː/ /beː/ /keː/ /deː/ /eː/ /ef/ /geː/ /haː/
   /iː/ /kaː/ /el/ /em/ /en/
   Letter O P Q R S T V X Y Z
   Latin name ō pē qū er es tē ū ex ī Graeca zēta
   Latin pronunciation ( IPA) /oː/ /peː/ /kʷuː/ /er/ /es/ /teː/ /uː/ /eks/
   /iː 'graika/ /'zeːta/
   The Duenos inscription, dated to the 6th century BC, shows the earliest
   known forms of the Old Latin alphabet.
   Enlarge
   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 the letters are disputed. In general,
   however, the Romans did not use the traditional (Semitic-derived) names
   as in Greek: the names of the stop consonant letters were formed by
   adding /eː/ to the sound (except for C, K, and Q which needed different
   vowels to distinguish them) 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 being not yet in use) but was changed to i Graeca ("Greek i")
   as Latin speakers had difficulty distinguishing /i/ and /y/ . 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.

   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
   Roman 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.

Medieval and later developments

   It was not until the Middle Ages that the letter J (representing
   non-syllabic I) and the letters U and W (to distinguish them from V)
   were added.

   The lower case ( minuscule) letters developed in the Middle Ages from
   New Roman Cursive cursive writing, first as the uncial script, and
   later as minuscule script. The old capital 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, e.g. "All the Sisters of the
   old Town had seen the Birds".

Spread of the Latin alphabet

   The Latin alphabet spread from Italy, along with the Latin language, to
   the lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea with the expansion of the
   Roman Empire. The eastern half of the Roman 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 of the Empire,
   and as the western Romance languages, including Spanish, French,
   Catalan, Portuguese and Italian, evolved out of Latin they continued to
   use and adapt the Latin alphabet. With the spread of Western
   Christianity the Latin alphabet spread to the peoples of northern
   Europe who spoke Germanic languages, displacing their earlier Runic
   alphabets, as well as to the speakers of Baltic languages, such as
   Lithuanian and Latvian, and several (non- Indo-European) Finno-Ugric
   languages, most notably Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian. During the
   Middle Ages the Latin alphabet also came into use among the peoples
   speaking West Slavic languages, including the ancestors of modern
   Poles, Czechs, Croats, Slovenes, and Slovaks, as these peoples adopted
   Roman Catholicism; the speakers of East Slavic languages generally
   adopted both Orthodox Christianity and the Cyrillic alphabet.

   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 southern 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.

   Over the past 500 years, the Latin alphabet has spread around the
   world. It spread to the Americas, Australia, and parts of Asia, Africa,
   and the Pacific with European colonization, along with the Spanish,
   Portuguese, English, French, and Dutch languages. In the late
   eighteenth century, the Romanians adopted the Latin alphabet; although
   Romanian is a Romance language, the Romanians were predominantly
   Orthodox Christians, and until the nineteenth century the Church used
   the Cyrillic alphabet. Vietnam, under French rule, adapted the Latin
   alphabet for use with the Vietnamese language, 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 languages,
   replacing earlier Arabic and indigenous Brahmic alphabets. 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, although use of the Pinyin has been very rare outside
   educational and tourism purposes.

   West Slavic and most 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 the l with stroke - ł - for a sound which was originally the
   so-called dark L, although it has become similar to w in modern
   varieties of the language. Czech uses diacritics as in Dvořák — the
   term háček (caron) originates from Czech. Croatian and the Latin
   version of Serbian use carons in č, š, ž, an acute in ć and a bar in đ.
   The languages of Eastern Orthodox Slavs generally use the Cyrillic
   alphabet instead, which is more closely based on the Greek alphabet.
   The Serbian language uses the two alphabets.

Extensions

   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 sometimes created. They were made 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 a collating
   sequence, which is often language-dependent.

Diacritics

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

Ligatures

   A ligature is a fusion of two or more ordinary letters into a new
   glyph. Examples are Æ from AE, Œ from OE, ß (the German eszett) from
   ſʒ, the Dutch IJ from I and J (Note that ĳ is capitalised as Ĳ, never
   Ij), and the abbreviation & from Latin et "and". The ſs pair is simply
   an archaic double s. The first glyph is the archaic medial form, and
   the second the final form.

Digraphs and trigraphs

   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 combined.
   Examples in English are CH, SH, TH. A trigraph is made up of three
   letters, like SCH in German. In some languages, digraphs and trigraphs
   can be regarded as part of the alphabet, and independent letters in
   their own right.

New forms

   Eth Ð ð and the Runic letters thorn Þ þ, and wynn Ƿ ƿ were added to the
   Old English alphabet. Eth and thorn were later replaced with th, and
   wynn with the new letter w. Although these three letters are no longer
   part of the English alphabet, eth and thorn are still used in the
   modern Icelandic alphabet.

   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, Ga uses the letters Ɛ ɛ, Ŋ ŋ and Ɔ ɔ and Adangme uses
   Ɛ ɛ 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.

Collation

   In some cases, such as with the Swedish symbols Ä, Ö, modified letters
   are regarded as new individual letters in themselves, and often
   assigned a specific place in the alphabet for collation purposes,
   separate from that of the letter on which they are based. 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. Different modified letters may be treated
   differently within a single language. For example, in Spanish the
   character Ñ is considered a letter in its own, and is 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.

Letters of the 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 (ash) from AE (e.g. " encyclopædia"), Œ (
   oethel) from OE (e.g. " cœlom") can be used for some words derived from
   Latin and Greek, and diaeresis on the letter ö (e.g. "coöperate") is
   sometimes used to indicate the pronunciation of "oo". Outside
   professional papers on specific subjects that traditionally use
   ligatures, ligatures and diaeresis are little used in modern English
   apart from on loan words.

Latin alphabet and international standards

   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 Standards Organisation (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 OSI basic 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

   Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_alphabet"
   This reference article is mainly selected from the English Wikipedia
   with only minor checks and changes (see www.wikipedia.org for details
   of authors and sources) and is available under the GNU Free
   Documentation License. See also our Disclaimer.
