(Redirected from Roman script)
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
Amerindian,
Indigenous Australian,
Austronesian,
Vietnamese,
Malay and
Indonesian 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 they transcribe or devise written standards for non-European languages; see for example the
African reference alphabet.
In modern usage, the term ''Latin alphabet'' is used for any straightforward derivation of the alphabet used by the Romans. These variants may discard some letters (e.g. the
Italian alphabet) or add extra letters (e.g. the
Polish alphabet) to or from the classical Roman script, and many letter shapes have changed over the centuries — such as the lower-case letters. The Latin alphabet evolved from the western variety of the
Greek alphabet, called the
Cumaean alphabet.
Evolution
Main articles: History of the Latin alphabet
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 Latin alphabet replaced the
Z — unneeded to write early Latin — with the new letter
G in the same position. An attempt by the emperor
Claudius to introduce three
additional letters was short-lived, but after the Roman conquest of
Greece in the
first century BC, Latin adopted the Greek letters
Y and Z — or, in the case of Z, readopted the letter — and added them to the alphabet's end. Thus it was that during the
classical Latin period the Latin alphabet contained 23 letters:
| Letter | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H |
|---|
| Latin name | ā | bē | cē | dē | ē | ef | gē | hā |
|---|
| Latin pronunciation (IPA) | /aː/ | /beː/ | /keː/ | /deː/ | /eː/ | /ef/ | /geː/ | /haː/ |
|---|
| Letter | I | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q |
|---|
| Latin name | ī | kā | el | em | en | ō | pē | qū |
|---|
| Latin pronunciation (IPA) | /iː/ | /kaː/ | /el/ | /em/ | /en/ | /oː/ | /peː/ | /kʷuː/ |
|---|
| Letter | R | S | T | V | X | Y | Z |
|---|
| Latin name | er | es | tē | ū | ex | ī Graeca | zēta |
|---|
| Latin pronunciation (IPA) | /er/ | /es/ | /teː/ | /uː/ | /eks/ | /iː 'graika/ | /'zeːta/ |
|---|
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 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 . The letter Y when introduced was probably called ''hy'' 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 and . 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 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.
Medieval and later developments
It was not until the
Middle Ages that the letter
W was added to the Latin alphabet (to represent sounds from the
Germanic languages which did not exist as independent
phonemes in the
Romance languages), and only after the
Renaissance did
J (representing a
consonantal
I) and
U (representing a
vocalic V) come to be treated as individual letters. Prior to that, they had been merely
glyph variants of I and V, respectively.
The lower case (
minuscule) letters developed in the Middle Ages from
New Roman Cursive, 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 and
proper adjectives. 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 the
Italian Peninsula, 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 gradually spread to the peoples of
northern Europe who spoke
Celtic languages (displacing the
Ogham alphabet) or
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 and several
South 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.
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.
Over the past 500 years, the Latin alphabet has spread around the world. It spread to
the Americas,
Oceania, 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, primarily because
Romanian is a Romance language; although, as the Romanians were predominantly Orthodox Christians, until the nineteenth century their 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.
L. L. Zamenhof used the Latin alphabet as the basis for the alphabet of
Esperanto.
Some glyph forms from the Latin alphabet served as the basis for the
Cherokee syllabary developed by
Sequoyah, however the sounds of the final syllabary were completely different.
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 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, and
Moldovan Romanian, respectively.
Kazakhstan,
Kyrgyzstan,
Tajikistan, and the breakaway region of
Transnistria kept the Cyrillic alphabet, chiefly due to their close ties with Russia. 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 letter
''ł'', for a sound which was originally the so-called
dark ''L'', but has become similar to an English ''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
Main articles: List of Latin letters,
Alphabets derived from the Latin
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 a
collating sequence, which is often language-dependent.
New forms
Eth (''Ð ð'') and the
Runic letters
thorn (''Þ þ''), and
wynn () 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 , ''Ŋ ŋ'' and and
Adangme uses and .
Hausa uses and for
implosives and for an
ejective. Africanists have standardized these into the
African reference alphabet.
Ligatures
Main articles: Ligature (typography)
A
ligature is a fusion of two or more ordinary letters into a new
glyph or character. Examples are ''
Æ'' from ''AE'', ''
Œ'' from ''OE'', the
abbreviation ''
&'' from
Latin ''et'' "and", the
Dutch ''
IJ'' from ''I'' and ''J'' (Note that ''ij'' is capitalised as ''IJ'', never ''Ij''), and the
German ''Eszett'' ''
ß'', from ''ſs'' (an archaic double ''s''; the first glyph is the archaic medial form, and the second the final form).
Diacritics
Main articles: 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 mark 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.
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 in English are ''
CH'', ''
SH'', ''
TH''. A trigraph is made up of three letters, like the German ''
SCH''. In some language
orthographies, digraphs and trigraphs are regarded as independent letters of the alphabet in their own right.
Collation
Main articles: Collation
In some cases, such as with the
Swedish symbols ''Å'', ''Ä'' and ''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 and trigraphs. 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''.
The English alphabet
:''Main articles:
English alphabet and
English words with diacritics''
As used in modern
English, the Latin alphabet consists of the following
characters
| 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"),
Π(''
oethel'') from OE (e.g. ''
cœlom'') can be used for some words derived from Latin and Greek, and the
diaeresis, is sometimes used for example on the letter ö (e.g. "coöperate") to indicate the pronunciation of "oo" as two separate vowels, rather than a single one. Outside professional papers on specific subjects that traditionally use ligatures, ligatures and diaereses 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 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.
See also
★
Romanization
★
Roman letters used in mathematics
★
Beghilos (Calculator spelling)
★
Palaeography
★
Kjell B. Sandved - Butterfly Alphabet
Further reading
★
Sign Symbol and Script, Jensen, Hans, , , George Allen and Unwin Ltd, 1970, ISBN 0-04-400021-9 . Transl. of
Die Schrift in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart, Jensen, Hans, , , VEB Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1958, , as revised by the author
★
Gli etruschi - Una nuova immagine, Rix, Helmut, , , Giunti, 1993,
★
Writing systems, Sampson, Geoffrey, , , London (etc.): Hutchinson, 1985,
★
Altlateinische Inschriften: sprachliche und epigraphische Untersuchungen zu den Dokumenten bis etwa 150 v.Chr. Bern (etc.), Wachter, Rudolf, , , , 1987, : Peter Lang.
★
Vox Latina — a guide to the pronunciation of classical Latin, W. Sidney Allen, , , Cambridge University Press, 1978, ISBN 0-521-22049-1 (Second edition)
★
Tuğan Tel, Biktaş, Şamil, , , , 2003,
★
Diacritics Project — All you need to design a font with correct accents
★
Lewis and Short ''Latin Dictionary'' on the letter ''G''
★
Latin-Alphabet
★
Latin alphabet at omniglot.com
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