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The Roman AlphabetThe Romans developed the alphabet we still use today. In this lesson we will introduce the Romans and ask how

their alphabet got to us.

Background

The Romans started out living in a city, just like the Greeks and Phoenicians. But instead of staying separated fromother cities, they extended their citizenship to their neighbors and joined with them to make a league of cities in Italy. Thisleague became very powerful, and after winning many wars the Romans acquired the large empire you see on the map. Ayou can see, both Greece and Phoenicia became parts of this empire.But the Romans learned the Greek alphabet even before they acquired their empire. They inherited not only the alphabet,but also many other cultural habits and institutions from the Greeks, and in particular they adopted the Greek idea of

writing lots of books. The Romans wrote poems, speeches, plays, histories, books of science, and books of thoughts abouthe world, all in Latin. From the Romans we possess many interesting letters, handbooks on building and farming, anddescriptions of famous events, such as the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD.The Romans needed the alphabet in order to administrate their large empire. They wrote many laws and decrees, and senletters to every corner of Europe, Africa and the Near East. Since the Romans passed their language to the nextgenerations, the laws and literature of the Middle Ages were also written in Latin. Latin was the language of government,learning, poetry, and science for nearly 2,000 years, and because of this it had a very strong influence on the languagesthat developed in modern times. Students can see this influence in your classroom when they look at their books, becausewhen they do that they are seeing the letters the Romans invented.

The classical Latin alphabet orRoman alphabet evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet callethe Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome. The Etruscaalphabet was in turn adopted and further modified by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language.

During the Middle Ages, the Latin alphabet was adapted to Romance languages, direct descendants of Latin, awell as to Celtic,Germanic, Baltic, and some Slavic languages. With the age of colonialism and Christian evangelism, thLatin script was spread overseas, and applied to indigenous American, Australian, Austronesian, Austroasiatiand African languages. More recently, linguistshave also tended to prefer the Latin script or the International PhonetAlphabet (itself largely based on Latin script) when transcribing or creating written standards for non-European languagessuch as the African reference alphabet.

The term Latin alphabetmay refer to either the alphabet used to write Latin (as described in this article), or otheralphabets based on the Latin script, which is the basic set of letters common to the various alphabets descended from theclassical Latin one, such as theEnglish alphabet. These Latin-derived alphabets may discard letters, like the Rotokasalphabet, or add new letters, like the Danish and Norwegian alphabet. Lettershapes have changed over the centuries,including the creation forMedieval Latin oflower case forms which did not exist in the Classical period.

OriginsIt is generally believed that the Romans adopted the Cumae alphabet, a variant of the Greek alphabet, in the 7th

century BC fromCumae, a Greek colony in Southern Italy.(Gaius Julius Hyginus in Fab. 277mentions the legend that itwas Carmenta, the Cimmerian Sibyl, who altered fifteen letters of the Greek alphabet to become the Latin alphabet, whichher son Evanderintroduced into Latium, supposedly 60 years before the Trojan War, but there is no historically soundbasis to this tale). The Ancient Greek alphabet was in turn based upon the Phoenician alphabet. From the Cumaealphabet, the Etruscan alphabet was derived and the Romans eventually adopted 21 of the original 26 Etruscan letters:

Classical Latin alphabet

After the Roman conquest of Greece in the 1st century BC, Latin adopted the Greek letters Y and Z (orreadopted, in the latter case) to writeGreek loanwords, placing them at the end of the alphabet. An attempt by theemperorClaudius to introduce three additional letters did not last. Thus it was that during the classical Latin period theLatin alphabet contained 23 letters:

Classical Latin alphabet

Letter A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

Latin name Bb Cc Dd EFef Gg Hh

Latin

pronunciation

(IPA)/a/ /be/ /ke/ /de/ /e/ /f/ /e/ /ha/

Letter I K L M N O P Q

Latin name Kk ELel EMem ENen Pp q

Latin /i/ /ka/ /l/ // /n/ /o/ /pe/ /ku/

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pronunciation

(IPA)

Letter R S T V X Y Z

Latin name ERer ESes Tt EXex GRAECA

GraecaZTAzta

Latin

pronunciation

(IPA)

// /s/ /te/ /u/ /ks/ /irajka/ /zeta/

The Latin names of some of these letters are disputed. In general, however, the Romans did not use the traditiona

(Semitic-derived) names as in Greek: the names of the plosives were formed by adding /e/ to their sound (except forKand 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 letterY when introduced was probably called "hy" /hy/ as in Greekthe 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/. Z was given its Greek name, zeta. For the Latin sounds represented by thevarious letters see Latin spelling and pronunciation; for the names of the letters in English see English alphabet.

The primary diacritic was the apex used to mark long vowels, which had previously been written double. However,

in place of taking an apex, the letter i was written taller: . For example, what is today transcribed lciwas

written CIAFILI in the inscription at right. The primary mark of punctuation was the interpunct, which was used as

a word divider, though it fell out of use 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 business accounts, by schoolchildren learning the Latin alphabetand even emperors issuing commands. A more formal style of writing was based on Roman square capitals, but cursivewas used for quicker, informal writing. It was most commonly used from about the 1st century BC to the 3rd century, but itprobably existed earlier than that. It led to Uncial, a majusculescript commonly used from the 3rd to 8th centuries AD byLatin and Greek scribes.

New Roman cursive script, also known as minuscule cursive, was in use from the 3rd century to the 7th century,

and uses letter forms that are more recognizable to modern eyes; a, b, d, and e had taken a more familiar shape,and the other letters were proportionate to each other. This script evolved into the medieval scripts knownas Merovingian and Carolingian minuscule.

Medieval and later developmentsIt was not until the Middle Ages that the letter W (originally a ligature of two Vs) was added to the Lat

alphabet, to represent sounds from the Germanic languages which did not exist in medieval Latin, and only aftethe Renaissance did the convention of treating I and U as vowels, and J and V as consonants, become establishedPrior to that, the former had been merely allographs of the latter.

With the fragmentation of political power, the style of writing changed and varied greatly throughout the MiddlAges, even after the invention of the printing press. Early deviations from the classical forms were the uncial script,development of the Old Roman cursive, and various so-called minuscule scripts that developed from New Roman cursiveof which the Carolingian minuscule was the most influential, introducing the lower case forms of the letters, as well as othewriting conventions that have since become standard.

The languages that use the Latin script today generally use capital letters to begin paragraphs and sentencesand proper nouns. The rules forcapitalization have changed over time, and different languages have varied in their rulesfor capitalization. Old English, for example, was rarely written with even proper nouns capitalized; whereas ModernEnglish of the 18th century had frequently all nouns capitalized, in the same way that Modern German is written today,e.g.Alle Schwestern der alten Stadt hatten die Vgel gesehen ("All of the sisters of the old city had seen the birds").

SpreadThe Latin alphabet spread, along with the Latin language, from the Italian Peninsula to the lands surroundin

the Mediterranean Sea with the expansion of the Roman Empire. The eastern half of the Empire, including Greece, Turkeythe Levant, and Egypt, continued to useGreek as a lingua franca, but Latin was widely spoken in the western half, and athe western Romance languages evolved out of Latin, they continued to use and adapt the Latin alphabet.

With the spread ofWestern Christianity during the Middle Ages, the script was gradually adopted by the peopleofnorthern Europe who spoke Celtic languages (displacing the Ogham alphabet) orGermanic languages (displacinearlierRunic alphabets), Baltic languages, as well as by the speakers of several Uralic languages, monotably Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian. The alphabet also came into use for writing the West Slavic languages anseveral South Slavic languages, as the people who spoke them adopted Roman Catholicism. In the 20tcentury romanization schemes were applied to many languages.

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