From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
|
Latin alphabet |
 |
| Type |
Alphabet |
| Spoken languages |
.^ Other languages written with the Latin alphabet .- Latin language, alphabet and pronunciation 12 January 2010 2:29 UTC www.omniglot.com [Source type: Reference]
^ Modern Latin was used by the Roman Catholic Church until the mid 20th century and is still used to some extent, particularly in the Vatican City, where it is one of the official languages.- Latin language, alphabet and pronunciation 12 January 2010 2:29 UTC www.omniglot.com [Source type: Reference]
^ ALPHABETUM is a Unicode font specifically designed for ancient languages that includes Ancient, Classical & Medieval Latin and many other ancient scripts http://guindo.pntic.mec.es/~jmag0042/alphabet.html .- Latin language, alphabet and pronunciation 12 January 2010 2:29 UTC www.omniglot.com [Source type: Reference]
|
| Time period |
~700 B.C. to the present. |
| Parent systems |
|
| Child systems |
Numerous: see Alphabets derived from the Latin |
| Sister systems |
Cyrillic
Coptic
Armenian
Runic/Futhark |
| Unicode range |
See Latin characters in
Unicode |
| ISO 15924 |
Latn |
|
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols
in Unicode. |
|
|
|
.^ ARTICLE from the Encyclopædia Britannica also called Roman alphabet 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.- Latin alphabet -- Britannica Online Encyclopedia 12 January 2010 2:29 UTC www.britannica.com [Source type: Reference]
^ Moreover, we use the Latin alphabet, so that the language is read without difficulty.- Latin Online: Series Introduction 12 January 2010 2:29 UTC www.utexas.edu [Source type: Original source]
^ Later development of the Latin alphabet ; in writing: Alphabetic systems ; in language: Evolution of writing systems ) influence of Etruscan alphabet ( in Etruscan alphabet ) scope of paleography ( in paleography ; in paleography: Textual corruptions ) use in .- Latin alphabet -- Britannica Online Encyclopedia 12 January 2010 2:29 UTC www.britannica.com [Source type: Reference]
.^ The Latin alphabet was taken over from the Greek through Etruscan.- Latin Online: Series Introduction 12 January 2010 2:29 UTC www.utexas.edu [Source type: Original source]
^ Moreover, we use the Latin alphabet, so that the language is read without difficulty.- Latin Online: Series Introduction 12 January 2010 2:29 UTC www.utexas.edu [Source type: Original source]
.^ But most of the common words that the two languages share by inheritance are somewhat concealed, many of them because of a massive change of consonants in Germanic before the modern era.- Latin Online: Series Introduction 12 January 2010 2:29 UTC www.utexas.edu [Source type: Original source]
.^ Moreover, we use the Latin alphabet, so that the language is read without difficulty.- Latin Online: Series Introduction 12 January 2010 2:29 UTC www.utexas.edu [Source type: Original source]
.^ Moreover, we use the Latin alphabet, so that the language is read without difficulty.- Latin Online: Series Introduction 12 January 2010 2:29 UTC www.utexas.edu [Source type: Original source]
^ English and Latin belong to the Indo-European language family; their earlier versions separated from each other over three thousand years ago.- Latin Online: Series Introduction 12 January 2010 2:29 UTC www.utexas.edu [Source type: Original source]
.^ Moreover, we use the Latin alphabet, so that the language is read without difficulty.- Latin Online: Series Introduction 12 January 2010 2:29 UTC www.utexas.edu [Source type: Original source]
.^ In ancient Roman times there were two main types of Latin script, capital letters and cursive.- Latin alphabet -- Britannica Online Encyclopedia 12 January 2010 2:29 UTC www.britannica.com [Source type: Reference]
^ The classical Latin alphabet consisted of 23 letters, 21 of which were derived from the Etruscan alphabet.- Latin alphabet -- Britannica Online Encyclopedia 12 January 2010 2:29 UTC www.britannica.com [Source type: Reference]
^ NEW ARTICLE SUGGEST EDIT ARTICLE HISTORY ADD TO YOUR SITE COMMENT History & Society : : Latin alphabet .- Latin alphabet -- Britannica Online Encyclopedia 12 January 2010 2:29 UTC www.britannica.com [Source type: Reference]
Letter shapes have changed over the
centuries, including the creation of entirely new
lower case
characters.
History
Origins
Archaic Latin alphabet
| A |
B |
C |
D |
E |
F |
Z |
H |
I |
K |
L |
M |
N |
O |
P |
Q |
R |
S |
T |
V |
X |
.^ In Latin the letter I was used both for its vocalic value and to represent the sound y as in yet .- Latin Online: Series Introduction 12 January 2010 2:29 UTC www.utexas.edu [Source type: Original source]
^ Similarly, the Latin letter V was used to represent both the vocalic value of U as in hue , and the sound w as in wet .- Latin Online: Series Introduction 12 January 2010 2:29 UTC www.utexas.edu [Source type: Original source]
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 horizontal 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/.
.^ Nonetheless it is useful to relate such words to their Latin counterparts.- Latin Online: Series Introduction 12 January 2010 2:29 UTC www.utexas.edu [Source type: Original source]
^ It is interesting to compare such cognate words, but the changes that both languages have undergone often conceal the relationships, as for the numerals for four and five .- Latin Online: Series Introduction 12 January 2010 2:29 UTC www.utexas.edu [Source type: Original source]
.^ It might also be noted that the third letter of the alphabet was pronounced with its value in cat , rather than with its value in cent or in our pronunciation of Caesar .- Latin Online: Series Introduction 12 January 2010 2:29 UTC www.utexas.edu [Source type: Original source]
^ In an earlier form of Latin, the verb was placed last in the sentence, as in the first clause of the Aeneid .- Latin Online: Series Introduction 12 January 2010 2:29 UTC www.utexas.edu [Source type: Original source]
^ The Latin alphabet was taken over from the Greek through Etruscan.- Latin Online: Series Introduction 12 January 2010 2:29 UTC www.utexas.edu [Source type: Original source]
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 ˈgraika/ |
/ˈzeːta/ |
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 letter '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. The modern language that has been most conservative
in preserving the ancient Roman names of the letters is the
German.
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
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
glyph variants of the latter.
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 of the Latin
alphabet
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.
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.
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
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
Wholly new
letters
Examples 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.
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
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
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:
RomanizationWhilst 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.
The English
alphabet
In addition, the
ligatures
Æ of
A with
E (e.g. "
encyclopædia"), and
Πof
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
part of the
language, per se, but rather typographic
convention.
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.
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