CLAUDIAN LETTERS

'Claudian letters' were developed by, and named after, the Roman Emperor Claudius (reigned 41–54). He introduced three new letters:

★ a reversed C (''antisigma'') to replace BS and PS, much like X stood in for CS and GS, and inspired by the Greek Psi. The appearance of this letter is disputed, however, since no inscription bearing it has been found. It may have been represented by two C's back to back, or some other symbol.

★ a turned F (''digamma inversum'') to represent consonantal U (W/V), possibly inspired by the Greek Digamma.

★ a half H to represent the sound of Greek Upsilon, a vowel sound between U and I (y) in Latin words such as ''Ol'y'mpicus''), possibly inspired by an early form of the spiritus asper.
These letters were used to a small extent on public inscriptions dating from his reign but their use was abandoned after his death. Their forms were probably chosen to ease the transition, as they could be made from templates for existing letters. Claudius may have been inspired to introduce these changes by a comment his mother Antonia made to him in his youth, to the effect that he would be as unlikely to become emperor as he would be able to change the alphabet. He may have been inspired by his ancestor Appius Claudius the Censor, who made earlier changes to the Latin alphabet. Claudius did indeed introduce his letters during his own term as censor, using arguments preserved in the historian Tacitus's account of his reign. In time, the letter Y was added to the Latin alphabet, filling the role of the broken "H" which Claudius had promulgated.
The reversed C is also used as a variant Roman numeral.
Support for the letters was added in the most recent version of Unicode, version 5.0.0. The letters are encoded as follows:

	Uppercase		Lowercase
	U+2132	TURNED CAPITAL F	U+214E	TURNED SMALL F
	U+2183	ROMAN NUMERAL REVERSED ONE HUNDRED	U+2184	LATIN SMALL LETTER REVERSED C
	U+2C75	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER HALF H	U+2C76	LATIN SMALL LETTER HALF H

Contents

Further reading

References

Further reading

★

★ Some Observations on the Censorship of Claudius and Vitellius, A.D. 47-48, , F. X., Ryan, American Journal of Philology, 1993

References

★ ★ class=wikiexternal target=_blank>.html Suetonius pass, Loeb Classical Library edition, 1913‑1914, English translation is by J. C. Rolfe. From LacusCurtius