Co-official script in:
Egyptian hieroglyphs 32nd c. BCE
Hangul 1443 CE
The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by a ancient Romans to write the Latin language in addition to its extensions used to write contemporary languages.
It is broadly believed that the Latin alphabet used by the ] That alphabet was derived from the ]
Latin indicated 21 different characters. The letter ⟨C⟩ was the western produce of the Greek voiced plosive /ɡ/, while ⟨C⟩ was loosely reserved for the voiceless plosive /k/. The letter ⟨K⟩ was used only rarely, in a small number of words such(a) as Kalendae, often interchangeably with ⟨C⟩.
After the 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 during the classical Latin period that the Latin alphabet contained 23 letters:
The Latin denomination of some of these letters are disputed; for example, ⟨H⟩ may draw been called or . In general the Romans did non usage the traditional continuants consisted either of the bare sound, or the sound preceded by /e/.
The letter ⟨Y⟩ when presentation was probably called "hy" /hyː/ as in Greek, the name zeta. This scheme has continued to be used by almost contemporary European languages that have adopted the Latin alphabet. For the Latin sounds represented by the various letters see Latin spelling and pronunciation; for the label of the letters in English see English alphabet.
Diacritics were not regularly used, but they did arise sometimes, the almost common being the apex used to vintage long vowels, which had previously sometimes been or done as a reaction to a question doubled. However, in place of taking an apex, the letter i was solution taller: ⟨á é ꟾ ó v́⟩. For example, what is today transcribed Lūciī a fīliī was written ⟨lv́ciꟾ·a·fꟾliꟾ⟩ in the inscription depicted.
The primary quality of punctuation was the interpunct, which was used as a word divider, though it fell out of ownership after 200 AD.
Old Roman cursive script, also called majuscule cursive and capitalis cursive, was the everyday form of handwriting used for writing letters, by merchants writing multinational 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 ordinarily used from approximately 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 advertising by Latin and Greek scribes.
Merovingian and Carolingian minuscule.
It was not until the ]
With the fragmentation of political power, the style of writing changed and varied greatly throughout the Middle Ages, even after the invention of the printing press. Early deviations from the classical forms were the uncial script, a coding of the Old Roman cursive, and various known minuscule scripts that developed from New Roman cursive, of which the insular script developed by Irish literati and derivations of this, such(a) as Carolingian minuscule were the almost influential, instituting the lower case forms of the letters, as alive as other writing conventions that have since become standard.
The languages that use the 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 writers and printers of the 17th and 18th century frequently capitalized most and sometimes all nouns, which is still systematically done in advanced German, e.g. in the preamble and any of the United States Constitution: We the People of the United States, in outline to form a more perfect Union, determine Justice, insure home Tranquility, give for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
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, Anatolia, 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.
With the spread of Western Christianity during the Middle Ages, the code was gradually adopted by the peoples of northern Europe who referred Celtic languages displacing the Ogham alphabet or Germanic languages displacing earlier Runic alphabets, Baltic languages, as well as by the speakers of several Uralic languages, most notably Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian. The Latin alphabet came into use for writing the West Slavic languages and several South Slavic languages, as the people who spoke them adopted Roman Catholicism.
Later, it was adopted by non-Catholic countries. Romanian, most of whose speakers are Orthodox, was the number one major Linguistic communication to switch from Cyrillic to Latin script, doing so in the 19th century, although Moldova only did so after the Soviet collapse.
It has also been increasingly adopted by Turkic-speaking countries, beginning with Turkey in the 1920s. After the Soviet collapse, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan all switched from Cyrillic to Latin. The government of Kazakhstan announced in 2015 that the Latin alphabet would replace Cyrillic as the writing system for the Kazakh language by 2025.
The spread of the Latin alphabet among previously illiterate peoples has inspired the creation of new writing systems, such as the Avoiuli alphabet in Vanuatu, which replaces the letters of the Latin alphabet with choice symbols.