Latin alphabet

     From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world, the standard script of the English language and the languages of most of Europe and those areas settled by Europeans. As used by the English language, it consists of the following characters:

Table of contents

1 Letters of the alphabet 1.1 Capital letters 1.2 Lowercase letters 1.3 Exclusive Letters 2 Evolution 3 History 4 Use in other languages 5 Collating in other languages 6 See Also 7 References

Letters of the alphabet

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

Lowercase 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

Exclusive Letters

ss

c

D

Þ

N

AE

Œ

these letters may or may not be exclusive to a single language

Evolution

The Latin, or Roman, alphabet was created in the 7th century BC (more precisely 753 BC), according to legend. It was based on the Etruscan alphabet, which was derived from the Greek. Of the original twenty-six Etruscan letters the Romans adopted twenty-one. The original Latin alphabet was A, B, C (which stood for both g and k), D, E, F, I (the Greek zeta), H, I (which stood for both i and j), K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R (though for a long time this was written P), S, T, V (which stood for u, v, and w), and X. Later the Greek zeta (I) was dropped and a new letter G was placed in its position. After the conquest of Greece in the first century BC the letters Y and Z were adopted from the Greek alphabet and placed at the end. Now the new Latin alphabet contained twenty-three letters. It was not until the Middle Ages that the letter J (to distinguish it from I) and the letters U and W (to distinguish them from V) were added. [1]

History

The Latin alphabet developed from the Etruscan alphabet at some time before 600 BC, it can be traced through Etruscan, Greek, and Phoenician scripts to the North Semitic alphabet used in Syria and Palestine about 1100 BC. The earliest inscription in the Latin alphabet appears on the Praeneste Fibula, a cloak pin dating from about the 7th century BC, which reads, MANIOS MED FHEFHAKED NUMASIOI (in Classical Latin: Manius me fecit Numerio, meaning Manius made me for Numerius). According to Hammarstroem (in Jensen 521), the letters for B, D, O, X hail from a Southern Italian Greek alphabet. However, there are Etruscan abecedaria with B, D, O, X (Sampson 108). Rix (203) claims that the sound values of those letters in Latin are to be attributed to Greek influence, the letters themselves were probably all present when the Romans took over the alphabet from the Etruscans (Wachter 33).

It is uncontested that the alphabet is mainly of Etruscan origin. The sound value of C proves that clearly. Etruscan had no voiced plosives, so this symbol - derived from the Greek gamma - came to stand for the unvoiced /k/ in Etruscan - as later in Latin. Jensen (521) notes that the letters C, K, Q were originally used in Latin according to Etruscan usage: C in front of /e, i/; K in front of /a/; Q in front of /u, o/. The letters thus stand for different allophones of /k/ (in the case of Latin, also /g/ and probably the phonemes /k_w/ and /g _w/ in the case of QU and GU). These spelling rules are due to the names of the letters: gamma or gemma; kappa; qoppa or quppa (Wachter 15). In Etruscan there was no /o/, so Q was used both in front of /o/ and /u/ in Latin. Y and Z were later additions taken from the Greek alphabet. G was created by Spurius Carvilius Ruga (around 230 BC) as a modification of C (Sampson 109). F (digamma) stood for /w/ in both Etruscan and Latin, but the Romans simplified the FH-/f/combination to F /f/. The semi-vowels /w, j/ and the vowels /u, u:, i, i:/ were written with the same letters, namely V and I respectively.

There was no 'U'; instead, there was the semi-vowel 'V'. There was no 'W', although 'V' was pronounced as the modern English 'W'. They didn't have the letter 'J', instead they had the semi-vowel 'I'.

Compare:

• Greek alphabet
• Hebrew alphabet
• Cyrillic alphabet

See also:

• Roman Naming Conventions

Use in other languages

In the course of its history, the Latin alphabet was used for new languages, and therefore, some new letters and diacritics were created, e.g.:

• the cedilla in c (originally a little z written below the c) that symbolized /ts/ in Romance
• the haček in Slavonic languages, used to mark palatalised versions of the base letter, e.g. č.
• the tilde in Spanish n, some Portuguese vowels (originally a little n written above the letter) used to mark the elision of a former N, and then later to mark nasalisation of the base letter and the Estonian o.
• the ă, ă, i, ş and ţ, as used in the Romanian language

Please see 'Alphabets derived from the Latin' for a more complete list.

W is a letter made up from two V's or U's. It was added in late Roman times to represent a Germanic sound. U and J were originally not distinguished from V and I respectively. In Old English, eth ð and the Runic letters thorn þ, and wynn ƿ were added. Eth and thorn were replaced with 'th', and wynn with the new letter 'w'. In modern Icelandic, thorn and eth are still used. The additional letters added in German are special presentations of earlier ligature forms (ae → ä, ue → ü or ſss → ß). French adds the circumflex to record elided consonants that were present in earlier forms and are often still present in the modern English cognate forms (Old French hostel → French hôtel = English hotel or Late Latin pasta → Middle French paste → French pâte and English paste).

Some Slavic languages use the latin alphabet rather than the Cyrillic. Among these, Polish uses a variety of digraphs with z to represent special phonetic values, and a dark l - ł - for a sound similar to w. Czech uses diacritics as in Dvořak. Croatian uses hačekss č š ž and also ć and đ. The Slavic regions which stayed with the Orthodox church generally use Cyrillic instead which is much closer to the Greek alphabet.

The African language Hausa uses three additional consonants: ɓ, ɗ and ƙ.

Collating in other languages

Alphabets derived from the Latin have varying collating rules:

• In French and English, characters with diaeresis (ae, e, i, oe, ue, y) are usually treated just like their un-accented versions. If two words differ only by an accent in French, the one with the accent is greater. (However, the Unicode 3.0 book specifies a more complex traditional French sorting rule for accented letters.)
• In German umlaut (Ä,Ö,Ü) are treated generally just like their non-umlauted versions; ß is always sorted as ss. This makes the alphabetic order Arg, Ärgerlich, Arm, Assistent, Aßlar, Assoziation. For phone directories and similar lists of names, the umlauts are to be collated like the letter combinations "ae", "oe", "ue". This makes the alphabetic order Udet, UEbelacker, Uell, UElle, Ueve, UExkuell, Uffenbach.
• In the Swedish alphabet, "W" is seen as a variant of "V" and not a separate letter. It is however recognised and maintained in names, like in "William". The alphabet also has three extra vowels placed at its end (..., X, Y, Z, A, AE, OE). The same alphabet and collating rules are used for Finnish.
• The same extra vowels as in Swedish are also present in the Danish and Norwegian alphabets but in a different order and with different glyphs (..., X, Y, Z, AE, O, A). Also, "Aa" collates as an equivalent to "A". The Danish alphabet sees "W" as a variant of "V".
• Some languages have more complex rules: for example, Spanish treated (til 1997) "CH" and "LL" as single letters, giving an ordering of CINCO, CREDO, CHISPA and LOMO, LUZ, LLAMA. This is not true anymore since in 1997 RAE adopted the more conventional usage, and now LL is collated between LI and LO, and CH between CE and CI. The only Spanish specific collating question is Ñ (eñe) as a different letter collated after N.
• In Dutch the combination IJ (representing IJ (Dutch Y)) was formerly to be collated as Y (or sometimes, as a separate letter Y < IJ < Z), but is currently mostly collated as 2 letters (II < IJ < IK). Note that a word starting with ij that is written with a capital I is also written with a capital J, e.g. the town IJmuiden (mun. Velsen) and the river IJssel.
• The Hungarian language has accents, umlauts, and double accents. The accent is ignored in collating, and the double accent, which indicates a long umlaut vowel, is treated as equal to the umlaut.
• In Icelandic, Þ is added, and D is followed by Ð.
• Both letters were also used by Anglo-Saxon scribes who also used the Runic letter Wynn to represent /w/.
• Þ (called thorn; lowercase þ) is also a Runic letter, some scholars derive it from Latin D.
• Ð (called eth; lowercase ð) is the letter D with an added stroke.
• In Polish, specifically Polish letters derived from the Latin alphabet are collated after their originals: A, Ą, B, C, Ć, D, E, Ę, ..., L, Ł, M, N, Ń, O, Ó, P, ..., S, Ś, T, ..., Z, Ź, Ż.
• In Czech, accented vowels are treated as their unaccented forms, but accented consonants (the ones with hacek) immediatelly follow their unaccented counterparts. The letter CH goes between H and I.
• In Esperanto, consonants with circumflex accents (ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ), as well as ŭ (u with breve), are counted as separate letters and collated separately (c, ĉ, d, e, f, g, ĝ, h, ĥ, i, j, ĵ ... s, ŝ, t, u, ŭ, v, z).
• In Romanian, special characters derived from the latin alphabet are collated after their orginals: A, Ă, A, ..., I, I, ..., S, Ş, T, Ţ, ..., Z.
• In Tatar, there are 9 additional letters. 5 of them are vowels, paired with main alphabet vowels as hard-smooth: a-ae, o-oe, u-ue, i-i, ı-e. The four remaining are consonants: ş is sh, c is ch, n is ng and ğ is gh.
• In Croatian and Serbian and related South Slavic languages, the five accented characters and two conjoined characters are sorted after the originals: ..., C, Č, Ć, D, DŽ, Đ, E, ..., L, LJ, M, N, NJ, O, ..., S, Š, T, ..., Z, Ž.

For multilingual situations with no one preferred language or alphabet, the Unicode Collation Algorithm can be used.

See Also

• Collation

References

• Jensen, Hans. 1970. Sign Symbol and Script. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd. Transl. of Die Schrift in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart. VEB Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften. 1958, as revised by the author.
• Rix, Helmut. 1993. "La scrittura e la lingua" In: Cristofani, Mauro (hrsg.) 1993. Gli etruschi - Una nuova immagine. Firenze: Giunti. S.199-227.
• Sampson, Geoffrey. 1985. Writing systems. London (etc.): Hutchinson.
• Wachter, Rudolf. 1987. Altlateinische Inschriften: sprachliche und epigraphische Untersuchungen zu den Dokumenten bis etwa 150 v.Chr. Bern (etc.): Peter Lang.
• Biktaş, Şamil, 2003, Tuğan Tel.