It was most commonly used from about the 1st century BC to the 3rd century, but it probably existed earlier than that. A more formal style of writing was based on Roman square capitals, but cursive was used for quicker, informal writing. 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. The modern language that has been most conservative in preserving the ancient Roman names of the letters appears to be German. 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 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 i) as Latin speakers had difficulty distinguishing its foreign sound /y/ from /i/. 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 Latin names of some of these letters are disputed. The Duenos inscription, dated to the 6th century BC, shows the earliest known forms of the Old Latin alphabet. Thus it was that during the classical Latin period the Latin alphabet contained 23 letters: An attempt by the emperor Claudius to introduce three additional letters did not last. The letter K was used only rarely, in a small number of loanwords such as Kalendae, often interchangeably with C.Īfter 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. From then on, G represented the voiced plosive /g/, while C was generally reserved for the voiceless plosive /k/. 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. The letter C was the western form of the Greek gamma, but it was used for the sounds /g/ and /k/ alike, possibly under the influence of Etruscan, which lacked any voiced plosives. From the Cumae alphabet, the Etruscan alphabet was derived and the Latins eventually adopted 21 of the original 26 Etruscan letters: The Ancient Greek alphabet was in turn based upon the Phoenician alphabet. Roman legend credited the introduction to one Evander, son of the Cimmerian Sibyl, supposedly 60 years before the Trojan War, but there is no historically sound basis to this tale. from Cumae, a Greek colony in Southern Italy. It is generally held that the Latins adopted the Cumae alphabet, a variant of the Greek alphabet, in the 7th century B.C. Main article: History of the Latin alphabet Origins Letter shapes have changed over the centuries, including the creation of entirely new lower case forms. These variants may discard letters from the classical Roman script (like the Rotokas alphabet) or add new letters to it (like the Danish and Norwegian alphabet). In modern usage, the term "Latin alphabet" is used for any straightforward derivation of the alphabet first used to write Latin. 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 devising written standards for non-European languages, such as the African reference alphabet. With the age of colonialism and Christian proselytism, the Latin alphabet was spread overseas, and applied to Amerindian, Indigenous Australian, Austronesian, East Asian, and African languages. It evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, and was initially developed by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language.ĭuring 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. The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today.