Latin Alphabet

Latin Alphabet
If you're trying to learn the Latin Alphabet you will find some useful resources including a course about pronunciation, and sound of all letters ... to help you with your Latin grammar . Try to concentrate on the lesson and memorize the sounds. Also don't forget to check the rest of our other lessons listed on Learn Latin . Enjoy the rest of the lesson!
Learning the Latin alphabet is very important because its structure is used in every day conversation. Without it, you will not be able to say words properly even if you know how to write those words. The better you pronounce a letter in a word, the more understood you will be in speaking the Latin language.
Below is a table showing the Latin alphabet and how it is pronounced in English, and finally examples of how those letters would sound if you place them in a word.
You saw how a letter is written and might be pronounced, but there is nothing better than hearing the sound of the letters in a video or audio. Below you will be able to hear how the letters above are pronounced, just press the play button:
The alphabet and its pronunciation have a very important role in Latin. Once you're done with Latin alphabet, you might want to check the rest of our Latin lessons here: Learn Latin . Don't forget to bookmark this page.
The links above are only a small sample of our lessons, please open the left side menu to see all links.

N.S. Gill is a Latinist, writer, and teacher of ancient history and Latin. She has been featured by NPR and National Geographic for her ancient history expertise.

Gill, N.S. "Latin Alphabet Changes: How the Roman Alphabet Got Its G." ThoughtCo, Aug. 28, 2020, thoughtco.com/latin-alphabet-changes-119429.
Gill, N.S. (2020, August 28). Latin Alphabet Changes: How the Roman Alphabet Got Its G. Retrieved from https://www.thoughtco.com/latin-alphabet-changes-119429
Gill, N.S. "Latin Alphabet Changes: How the Roman Alphabet Got Its G." ThoughtCo. https://www.thoughtco.com/latin-alphabet-changes-119429 (accessed October 14, 2022).

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The letters of the Latin alphabet were borrowed from the Greek, but scholars believe indirectly from the ancient Italian people known as the Etruscans . An Etruscan pot found near Veii (a city which was sacked by Rome in the 5th century BCE) had the Etruscan abecedary inscribed on it, reminding the excavators of its Roman descendants. By the 7th century BCE, that alphabet was used not just to render Latin in written form, but several others of the Indo-European languages in the Mediterranean region, including Umbrian, Sabellic, and Oscan.

The Greeks themselves based their written language on a Semitic alphabet, the Proto-Canaanite script which may have been created as long ago as the second millennium BCE. The Greeks passed it on to the Etruscans, the ancient people of Italy, and at some point before 600 BCE, the Greek alphabet was modified to become the alphabet of the Romans.

One of the main differences between the Romans' alphabet in comparison with the Greeks' is that the third sound of the Greek alphabet is a g-sound:

whereas in the Latin alphabet, the third letter is a C, and G is the 6th letter of the Latin alphabet.

This shift resulted from changes to the Latin alphabet over time.

The third letter of the Latin alphabet was a C, as in English. This "C" could be pronounced hard, like a K or soft like an S. In linguistics, this hard c/k sound is referred to as a voiceless velar plosive —you make the sound with your mouth open and from the back of your throat. Not only the C, but also the letter K, in the Roman alphabet, was pronounced like a K (again, hard or voiceless velar plosive). Like the word-initial K in English, the Latin K was rarely used. Usually—perhaps, always—the vowel A followed K, as in Kalendae 'Kalends' (referring to the first day of the month), from which we get the English word calendar. The use of the C was less restricted than the K. You can find a Latin C before any vowel.

The same third letter of the Latin alphabet, C, also served the Romans for the sound of G—a reflection of its origin in the Greek gamma (Γ or γ).

Latin: The letter C = sound of K or G

The difference is not as great as it looks since the difference between K and G is what is referred to linguistically as a difference in voicing: the G sound is the voiced (or "guttural") version of the K (this K is the hard C, as in "card" [the soft C is pronounced like the c in cell, as "suh" and not relevant here]). Both are velar plosives, but the G is voiced and the K is not. At some period, the Romans seem not to have paid attention to this voicing, so the praenomen Caius is an alternative spelling of Gaius; both are abbreviated C.

When the velar plosives (C and G sounds) were separated and given different letterforms, the second C was given a tail, making it a G, and moved to the sixth place in the Latin alphabet, where the Greek letter zeta would have been, if it had been a productive letter for the Romans. It was not.

An early version of the alphabet used by some ancient people of Italy did, in fact, include the Greek letter zeta. Zeta is the sixth letter of the Greek alphabet, following alpha (Roman A), beta (Roman B), gamma (Roman C), delta (Roman D), and epsilon (Roman E).

Where zeta (Ζ or ζ) was used in Etruscan Italy, it kept its 6th place.

The Latin alphabet originally had 21 letters in the first century BCE, but then, as the Romans became Hellenized, they added two letters at the end of the alphabet, a Y for the Greek upsilon, and a Z for the Greek zeta, which then had no equivalent in the Latin language.

The Latin, or Roman, alphabet was originally adapted from the
Etruscan alphabet during the 7th century BC to write Latin. Since then it has had many different forms, and been adapted to write many other languages.

According to Roman legend, the Cimmerian Sibyl, Carmenta, created the Latin alphabet by adapting the Greek alphabet used in the Greek colony of Cumae in southern Italy. This was introduced to Latium by Evander, her son. 60 years after the Trojan war. There is no historical evidence to support this story, which comes from the Roman author, Gaius Julius Hyginus (64BC - 17AD).

The earliest known inscriptions in the Latin alphabet date from the 6th century BC. It was adapted from the Etruscan alphabet during the 7th century BC. The letters Y and Z were taken from the Greek alphabet to write Greek loan words. Other letters were added from time to time as the Latin alphabet was adapted for other languages.

This is a version of the earliest known text in Latin. It is known as the Duenos inscription, and was found on the Quirinal Hill in Rome by Heinrich Dressel, a German archaeologist, in 1880. It is thought to date from the 7th to 5th century BC.

Opnēs hemones decnotāti et iovesi louberoi et parēs gnāscontor, rationes et comscientiās particapes sont, quois enter sēd comcordiās studēōd agontinom est.

Obnēs homenēs degnetāte et iouse leiberei et parēs gnāscontor, ratiōnes et cōnscientiaī particepēs sont, queis enter sēd concordiaī studeōd agondom est.

Old Latin translations by Giorgio Nagy

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
(Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights)

The modern Latin alphabet is used to write hundreds of different languages. Each language uses a slightly different set of letters, and they are pronounced in various ways. Some languages use the standard 26 letters, some use fewer, and others use more.

This is the modern Latin alphabet as used to write English.

Many languages supplement the basic Latin alphabet with a variety of accented letters:

Note : the names of these accents varies from language to language. In Czech, for example, the caron is known as a háček [ˈɦaːtʃɛk], which means 'little hook'.

These accented letters can have a number of different functions:

How to type accented letters in Windows ,
Mac
and HTML

Eth, Thorn, Yogh and Wynn were used in Old English ; Eth and Thorn are also used in Icelandic ; the long s was used in English and other languages to write non-final esses until about the late 18th / early 19th century; the dotted upper case i and dotless lowercase i are used in Turkish , and the schwa is used in Azeri . The other letters are used in various other languages, particularly those spoken in West Africa.

These are used in a number of languages including French, German,
Icelandic, Croatian and Dutch:

Click here
to find out how to type ligatures in Windows ,
Mac
and HTML

ALPHABETUM - a Unicode font
specifically designed for ancient scripts, including classical
& medieval Latin, ancient Greek, Etruscan, Oscan, Umbrian,
Faliscan, Messapic, Picene, Iberian, Celtiberian, Gothic, Runic,
Old & Middle English, Hebrew, Sanskrit, Old Nordic, Ogham,
Kharosthi, Glagolitic, Old Cyrillic, Phoenician, Avestan, Ugaritic,
Linear B, Anatolian scripts, Coptic, Cypriot, Brahmi, Old Persian cuneiform:
http://guindo.pntic.mec.es/~jmag0042/alphabet.html

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Latin Alphabet – 23 Magical Letters Used Around The World

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The Latin alphabet is also called the Roman alphabet. It is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. The Latin, or Roman, alphabet was originally adapted from the Etruscan alphabet during the 7th century. The term Latin script is often used for the entire family of alphabets.
The Latin alphabet is used in various forms by many languages, like Romance languages, Germanic, Celtic, some Slavic languages, Amerindian, Indigenous Australian, Austronesian, Vietnamese, Malay and Indonesian languages. Those languages discard letters from or add letters to the classical Latin alphabet.
The Latin alphabet has been developed through ages. There was The Classical Latin alphabet. Then There were some changes in the medieval times. In ancient Roman times there were two main types of Latin script, capital letters and cursive.
What is The Origin of The Latin Alphabet?
There are different opinions about the origin of the Latin alphabet. Some go with the opinion that the Latin alphabet was borrowed directly from the Greek. Others believe that it was partially borrowed from the Etruscan, a language spoken by the Etruscans in Etruria, Italy until about the 1st century AD.
The Etruscan alphabet developed from a Western variety of the Greek alphabet brought to Italy by Euboean Greek. Cumae, a Greek colony, brought the western variant of the Greek alphabet to the Latins in the 7th century BC in southern Italy. From the Cumae alphabet, the Etruscan alphabet was derived and the Latins finally adopted 21 of the original 26 Etruscan letters.
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 earliest known inscriptions in the Latin alphabet date from the 6th century BC. It was adapted from the Etruscan alphabet during the 7th century BC. Here is a table to show the ancient Latin alphabet:
Latin was originally written either from right to left, left to right, or alternating between those two directions. By the 5th or 4th century BC it was normally written from left to right.
The Latins originally adopted 21 of the original 26 Etruscan letters. The sounds /g/ and /k/ were not distinguished in the oldest Latin texts. Before a vowel or between vowels I was pronounced /j/. Elsewhere it was pronounced /i/. The letters k, y, and z used only for writing words of Greek origin.
The letter J, and U and W were added in the Middle Ages. The lower case letters developed in the Middle Ages from New Roman Cursive writing. The old capital Roman letters were only used at that time for formal writings and writing documents.
The rules of capitalization have been changed over time, also rules were different from language to the other. Some languages used capital letters only for the beginning of the paragraph or for the proper nouns, while other languages used them for most of the nouns like the today German language.
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 common language (lingua franca).
The western half of the Empire spoke Latin. The western Romance languages, including Spanish, French, Catalan, Portuguese and Italian, derived from Latin and continued to use and adapt the Latin alphabet. The Latin alphabet spread to the peoples of northern Europe With the spread of Western Christianity.
As late as 1492, only the languages spoken in western, northern and central Europe used the Latin alphabet. 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.
The Latin alphabet 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.
The modern Latin alphabet consists of 52 letters, including both upper and lower case, plus 10 numerals, punctuation marks and a variety of other symbols such as %, @ and &. These are the 26 letters we are familiar with today. Here is a list of the modern Latin alphabet:
In 1928, Turkey adopted the Latin alphabet for the Turkish language. Later on it was displaced. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, several of the newly-independent Turkic-speaking republics adopted the Latin alphabet. In the 1970 s, the People’s Republic of China developed their own alphabet into the Latin alphabet.
Many languages added the basic Latin alphabet with a variety of accented letters. Its main usage is to change the phonetic value of the letter to which it is added, but it may also be used to modify the pronunciation of a whole word or syllable, or to distinguish between homographs. Here is a list of the accented letters:
By the 1960 s, the International Standards Organisation (ISO) simplified the Latin alphabet in their standard. This action is done based on popular usage. Later standards issued by the ISO, have continued to define the 26 x 2 letters of the English alphabet as the basic Latin alphabet with extensions to handle other letters in other languages.
Greek symbols and Greek-to-Latin alphabet conversion
How to Pronounce The Latin Alphabet?
Here is a list of the Latin alphabet along with the Greek name and English pronunciation:
The Old English Latin alphabet generally consisted of 24 letters, and was used for writing from the 9th to the 12th centuries. Most texts were written in West Saxon, one of the four main dialects. Here is a list of the Old English alphabet:
Roman numerals are a system for representing numbers with letters of the Latin, or Roman, alphabet. Several letters from the Latin alphabet are used for the representation of roman numerals. There was a need to create a standardized system that could be used for trade and communications. It was widely used throughout Europe as the standard writing system until the late middle ages.
Modern Roman numerals use seven letters to represent different numbers. These letters are I = 1; V = 5; X = 10; L = 50; C = 100; D = 500; M = 1,000. The numerals can be written as either capital or lowercase letters. A bar over a numeral multiplies its value by 1,000: for example:
When a numeral is followed by one of equal or lesser value, their values are added together. In other words, if a symbol holding a greater value is placed after another symbol of greater or equal value, it will be added. These are some examples:
A numeral is never used more than three times in a row. Instead of repeating the numeral a fourth time, the value is expressed by a smaller numeral followed by a larger numeral. In other words, if a symbol of a smaller value is placed before a greater value symbol, it will be subtracted. Here are some examples:
The letters I, X, C can be repeated thrice in succession. Additionally, L, V, D cannot be repeated or the number is considered to be invalid.
To convert Arabic numbers to Roman Numerals, we split the numbers into their least expandable form, write their respective Roman letters and add /subtract them. For example, 2523 is converted to MMDXXIII.
How Many Languages Use the Latin Alphabet?
At least 100 languages today use the Roman alphabet as its primary orthography. These languages include all of the languages of Western Europe, which include English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Irish, Dutch, etc.
several languages of the Western Hemisphere such as Quechua and Hawaiian, several Eastern European languages such as Czech, Polish, Croatian, and to some extent Macedonian and Serbian as an alternative script.
several African languages such as Swahili, Afrikaans, and Zulu, and even some Asian languages, particularly Turkish, Vietnamese, Bahasa Malay, Bahasa Indonesia, which have replaced the Chinese and Arabic scripts almost entirely, if not altogether, and Tagalog.
How is the Latin Alphabet Used Today?
As it is mentioned in the preceding paragraphs, around 100 languages use the Latin alphabet in writing. Each language uses a different set of alphabet. Some languages add the to the Latin alphabet, other languages use fewer sets of the Latin alphabet. This is the modern Latin alphabet as used to write English.
The word calligraphy means artistic or stylized handwriting. Latin has different styles of writing. Most calligraphy is done with pen and ink on paper. It didn’t exist before the 15th century. Here are some of these writing styles:
It is one of the stylized handwriting. It was used between the 1st and 9th centuries AD. It was used throughout the Roman Empire for books and occasionally for formal documents. A pen with a broad end is used for this style. The Rustic Capitals consist only of capital letters. Here’s a sample of the Rustic Capital:
It is another stylized Latin handwriting. It was used in the 1st century for most documents. A pen, cut to a narrow point, is used in this style of writing. Some of the letters in this style are used in lowercase letters, small letters, and joined to the following one. Here’s a sa
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