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The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. The basic alphabet comprises 26 letters and is used, with some modification, for most of the languages of Europe (excluding some Eastern European countries), the Americas, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the islands of the Pacific. Languages that use the Latin alphabet include the descendants of the Latin language (i.e. the Romance languages: French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Catalan, Galician), Germanic languages (like English, German, Dutch), Western Slavic languages (e.g., Polish, Czech), Celtic languages (e.g., Irish, Welsh, Scots Gaelic, Manx) , Finno-Ugric language (Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian) Austronesian languages (Hawaiian, Indonesian, Javanese, Malay, Tagalog) and other languages such as Vietnamese, Turkish, Hausa, Swahili, and many others. In modern usage, the term Latin alphabet is used for any straightforward derivation of the alphabet used by the Romans. These variants may drop letters (e.g., Hawaiian) or add letters (e.g., Czech, Lithuanian) to or from the classical Roman script, and of course many letter shapes have changed over the centuries — such as the lower-case letters which the Romans would not have recognized. The Latin alphabet evolved from the Greek alphabet which is based upon the Phoenician alphabet.
Overview The default Latin alphabet is the Roman, supplemented with G, J, U, W, Y, Z, and lower-case variants: 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 Additional letters may be formed However, these glyphs are not always considered independent letters of the alphabet. Letters of the alphabet As used in modern English, the Latin alphabet consists of the following characters (cf. English alphabet): 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 sometimes created. They were made by adding marks to create diacritics, by joining multiple letters together to make ligatures, or by creation of completely new forms. These new forms are given a place in the alphabet by defining a collating sequence. This is language-dependent, as shown below. New forms Eth Ðð and the Runic letters thorn Þþ, 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. For a short time in Roman history, three new letters, called the Claudian letters, were added to the alphabet, but they were not widely received and were eventually removed. 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 , Ŋŋ and and Adangme uses and . Hausa uses and for implosives and for an ejective. Africanists have standardized these into the African reference alphabet. Ligatures A ligature is a fusion of two or more ordinary letters into a new glyph. Examples are Æ from AE, Œ from OE, ß (eszett) from ſʒ, Dutch ij from i and j, and & from et. The "ſs" pair is simply an archaic double s. The first glyph is the archaic medial form, and the second the final form. Note that ij is capitalised as IJ (never Ij). Diacritics Diacritics are marks that are added to specific letters to modify their pronunciation. The effect is language dependent. There are other diacritics and other uses for the ones described here. Please see Alphabets derived from the Latin for a more complete list. Evolution 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. In the original Latin alphabet, Later, probably during the 3rd century BC, the Z was dropped and a new letter G was placed in its position. An attempt by the emperor Claudius to introduce three additional letters was short-lived, but after the conquest of Greece in the first century BC the letters Y and Z were, respectively, adopted and readopted from the Greek alphabet and placed at the end. Now the new Latin alphabet contained 23 letters: W is a letter made up from two Vs or Us. It was added in late Roman times to represent a Germanic sound. The letters U and J, similarly, were originally not distinguished from V and I, respectively. 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. Medieval and later developments It was not until the Middle Ages that the letter J (representing non-syllabic I) and the letters U and W (to distinguish them from V) were added. The alphabet used by the Romans consisted only of capital (upper case or majuscule) letters. The lower case (minuscule) letters developed in the Middle Ages from cursive writing, first as the uncial script, and later as minuscule script. The old 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. 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 Italy, 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 spread to the peoples of northern Europe who spoke 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, 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. Over the past 500 years, the Latin alphabet has spread around the world. It spread to the Americas, Australia, 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; although Romanian is a Romance language, the Romanians were predominantly Orthodox Christians, and until the nineteenth century the 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. 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 Uniform Turkic alphabet in the 1930s. 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 adopted the Latin alphabet, replacing Cyrillic. Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan have officially adopted the Latin alphabet for Azeri, Uzbek, and Turkmen, respectively. 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 l with stroke - ł - for a sound similar to w. 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 Cyrillic instead which is much closer to the Greek alphabet. The Serbian language uses two alphabets. Collating sequence with extensions Alphabets derived from the Latin have varying collating rules: The Unicode Collation Algorithm can be used to get any of the collation sequences described above, by tailoring its default collation table. Several such tailorings are collected in Common Locale Data Repository. See also | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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