Latin alphabet

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Latin alphabet

Type Alphabet
Spoken languages Latin, Romance languages, and Modern Germanic Languages; most languages of Europe; many other languages; Romanizations exist for practically all known languages.
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.
History of the alphabet

The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. It evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was borrowed and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome, whose alphabet was then adapted and further modified by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language.

During the Middle Ages, it was adapted to the Romance languages, the direct descendants of Latin, as well as to the Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, and some Slavic languages, and finally to most of the languages of Europe.

With the age of colonialism and Christian evangelism, the Latin alphabet was spread overseas, and applied to Indigenous American, Indigenous Australian, Austronesian, East Asian, and African 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 transcribing or creating written standards for non-European languages, such as the African reference alphabet.

In modern usage, the term Latin alphabet is used for any direct derivation of the alphabet first used to write Latin. These variants may discard letters from the classical Roman script (like the Rotokas alphabet) or add new characters to it, as from the Danish and Norwegian alphabet. Letter shapes have changed over the centuries, including the creation of entirely new lower case characters.

History

Origins

It is generally believed that the Romans adopted the Cumae alphabet‎, a variant of the Greek alphabet, in the 7th century B.C. from Cumae, a Greek colony in Southern Italy. (Gaius Julius Hyginus in Fab. 277 mentions the legend that it was Carmenta, the Cimmerian Sibyl. who altered fifteen letters of the Greek alphabet to become the Latin alphabet, which her son Evander introduced into Latium, supposedly 60 years before the Trojan War, but there is no historically sound basis to this tale.) The Ancient Greek alphabet was in turn based upon the Phoenician alphabet. From the Cumae alphabet, the Etruscan alphabet was derived and the Romans eventually adopted 21 of the original 26 Etruscan letters:

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

The letter C was the western form of the Greek gamma, but it was used for the sounds /ɡ/ and /k/ alike, possibly under the influence of Etruscan, which lacked any voiced plosives. 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/. The letter K was used only rarely, in a small number of words such as Kalendae, often interchangeably with C.

After the Roman conquest of Greece in the first century BC, Latin adopted the Greek letters Y and Z (or rather readopted, in the latter case) to write Greek loanwords, placing them at the end of the alphabet. 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.