Roman alphabet

The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the most used writing system today, belonging to the category of alphabets, initially designed for transcribing the Latin language, then extended to many other languages across the World.

Origins

It is the original version of the Roman alphabet, as used by the Romans for the Latin language. It is derived from, and very similar to, the Greek alphabet. The Romans adopted the alphabet from the Etruscans, who had adopted it from the Greeks who had colonized Sicily and the southern Italian peninsula. The "West Greek" alphabet was slightly different from the East Greek alphabet which evolved into the modern Greek alphabet, which caused some of the letterform changes. The Etruscans had no sound for 'g' (voiced velar stop) in their language, but three different 'k' (voiceless velar stop) sounds, and so adopted the Greek gamma to represent a 'k' sound; the shape of the West Greek gamma was similar to Latin C, and eventually the letter morphed into the modern 'C'.

Spread

With some modifications, and more often called the Roman alphabet, it is the writing system currently used for a great number of languages around the world. It is used by some international languages such as English, Spanish, German, and French, as well as all the other Romance languages, all the other Germanic languages, some Slavic languages, Turkish, Albanian, Hungarian, Finnish, Indonesian, Malay, and Vietnamese. Since the 19th century, it has been used by many languages of Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas that have been codified under western European influence.

Letters and order

The most typical variant of the Latin alphabet is now the English alphabet, which is similar to that of many other languages, with the following twenty-six letters in the following order:

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

The classical Latin language used only the following letters:

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

The medieval use of Latin has adopted the new signs J, U and W, being firstly variants of I (> J) and V (> U, W), later recognized in the Modern Era as independent letters. The ligatures Æ and Œ appeared in Latin and in other languages during the Middle Ages; but Classical Latin used to write AE and OE instead of Æ and Œ.

In Late Antiquitity and at the beginning of the Middle Ages, along with the evolution of writing techniques, each letter was dubbed in an uppercase shape (traditional, as in the classical use, but restricted in use) and a lowercase shape (innovative and for general use). Thus, the basic collection of signs became the following:

A/a (Æ/æ), B/b, C/c, D/d, E/e, F/f, G/g, H/h, I/i (J/j), K/k, L/l, M/m, N/n, O/o (Œ/œ), P/p, Q/q, R/r, S/s, T/t, V/v (U/u, W/w), X/x, Y/y, Z/z

Since then, many languages have added letters like Þ, Ȝ or Ƿ for additional sounds. Some languages have adopted certain digraphs as letters (such as Spanish CH and LL), and added a wide variety of diacritical marks to many of the letters (such as Ð, È, Ť, Å, Ç and so on). Some languages have also abandoned various letters. Thus, the Latin alphabet has now many variants adapted to the needs of different languages.

Use as numerals

Some characters of the Latin alphabet (C, D, I, L, M, V, X) are used in the Roman numeral system; unlike the Greek numeral system, not all the letters are used as numbers.