Latin Script

Latin Script

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Last Updated:

Sep 6, 2022

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Etruscan alphabet

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Latin alphabet , also called Roman alphabet , the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world, the standard script of the English language and the languages of most of Europe and those areas settled by Europeans. Developed from the Etruscan alphabet at some time before 600 bce , it can be traced through Etruscan, Greek , and Phoenician scripts to the North Semitic alphabet used in Syria and Palestine about 1100 bce . The earliest inscription in the Latin alphabet appears on the Praeneste Fibula , a cloak pin dating from about the 7th century bce , which reads, “MANIOS MED FHEFHAKED NUMASIOI” (in Classical Latin: “Manius me fecit Numerio,” meaning “Manius made me for Numerius”). Dated not much later than this is a vertical inscription on a small pillar in the Roman Forum , and the Duenos inscription on a vase found near the Quirinal (a hill in Rome ) probably dates to the 6th century bce . Although experts disagree on the dating of these objects, the inscriptions are generally considered to be the oldest extant examples of the Latin alphabet.
The Classical Latin alphabet consisted of 23 letters, 21 of which were derived from the Etruscan alphabet. In medieval times the letter I was differentiated into I and J and V into U , V , and W , producing an alphabet equivalent to that of modern English with 26 letters. Some European languages currently using the Latin alphabet do not use the letters K and W , and some add extra letters (usually standard Latin letters with diacritical marks added or sometimes pairs of letters read as one sound).
In ancient Roman times there were two main types of Latin script, capital letters and cursive. There were also varieties of writing that mixed capitals and cursive or semicursive letters; Latin uncial script developed from such a mixed form in the 3rd century ce . In the Middle Ages many different Latin scripts developed from capital, cursive, and uncial forms. The round “humanistic” handwriting, used for copying books, and a more angular cursive script, used for legal and commercial purposes in 15th-century Italy, gave rise, respectively, to the roman and italic typefaces currently used in printing.
The table shows the Latin alphabet.

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Latin script displaced the German scripts (Gothic, Schwabacher and Fraktur), which were illegible for readers outside the German states (Augst, 1996: 77).
The Latin alphabet, the basis of current Western European alphabets, was derived from a form of Greek script introduced into Italy by colonists from Euboea. In its classical form, it contains all the letters that are still used in Modern English except for J, U, and W; V (the U shape developed later) was used for the vowel /u/ and the semivowel /w/; I was used for the vowel /i/ and the semivowel /j/. Y and Z, originally absent from Latin, were imported for use in Greek borrowings. The capital letters, used for inscriptions, have retained their classical form more or less unchanged. Originating in Roman cursive, a variety of handwritten styles evolved from late antiquity onward and ultimately gave rise to modern lowercase letters.
Written Welsh uses the Roman alphabet. Particular orthographic conventions include several digraphs, e.g. 〈th〉 for /θ/, 〈dd〉 for /ð/, 〈ch〉 for /χ/ and 〈ll〉 for /ɬ/; 〈w〉 and 〈i〉 represent the consonants /w/ and /j/ or the vowels /u/ and /i/ respectively, and 〈y〉 represents /ə/ and /ɨ(ː)/.
The vowels, diphthongs, and consonants of Welsh are listed in Table 1 . The main dialect variations with respect to this inventory are the absence of /ɨ(ː)/ (and diphthongs closing to /ɨ/) in southern Welsh, of /ə/ in the extreme south-west, and of /h/ and voiceless / r ˚ / in the south-east. Conservative northern speakers will substitute /s/ for /z/, which features in some loans from English. Two affricates – /t∫/ and /d3/ – feature in loanwords and in dialects. Other salient dialect differences are listed in Table 2 .
Table 1 . Phoneme inventory of modern Welsh
Table 2 . Three dialect differences
In common with the other Celtic languages, some of the initial consonants of Welsh words vary according to their grammatical context, for example:
Such consonantal changes are traditionally called mutations. They may be triggered by a preceding word, such as the personal pronouns in the above examples, or by grammatical context. For example, the object of a verb will mutate but not the subject:
There are three mutations, which may affect up to nine consonants ( Table 3 ).
The core vocabulary of Welsh is Celtic, for example, drws ‘door’, dyn ‘man’, and haul ‘sun’. There are some 800 loanwords from Latin, mostly borrowed during the Roman occupation (43–410 a.d. ); many of these refer to architectural and religious innovations, for example, eglwys ‘church’ from Latin ecclēsia , ffenestr ‘window’ from fenestra , and pont ‘bridge’ from pontem . There are also many thousands of loans from English. A very few of these may be dated to the Old English period, but the numbers increase from the medieval period onward; examples are cwpan ‘cup’, sêt ‘seat’, trowsus ‘trousers’.
There are some dialect differences in the vocabulary, particularly between northern and southern varieties; for example, ‘grandmother’ is nain in northern Welsh but mam-gu in southern Welsh; ‘out’ is allan in the north but mâs in the south; and ‘with’ is efo in the north but gyda in the south. Standard Welsh may use both nain and mam-gu, but only allan and gyda . Speakers are generally tolerant of such variation.
Keeping pace with developments in English vocabulary has occupied lexicographers since the 18th century. More recently, educationalists who are concerned with delivering the school curriculum through the medium of Welsh have planned the elaboration of Welsh vocabulary through coinage, borrowing, and adaptation. The standardization of subject-specific vocabularies is undertaken professionally.
Welsh is a VSO language. For example:
Welsh has a definite article but no indefinite article. Adjectives tend to follow the noun they qualify, for example:
Welsh has grammatical gender. Some adjectives have feminine and plural forms, a feature that is more prominent in formal styles and northern dialects, for example:
Numerals have masculine/neutral and feminine forms for 1 ( un ), 2 ( dau, dwy ), 3 ( tri, tair ) and 4 ( pedwar, pedair ). The gender of the numeral un is apparent only when nouns beginning with certain consonants follow it; cf.
Informal spoken varieties of Welsh show considerable variation, and may be heavily influenced by English vocabulary, morphology, syntax, and intonation, with frequent code-switching. Formal varieties tend to be more conservative and to favor native features.
Slovene is written in modified Roman letters, with diacritic marks for sounds not represented by the inherited alphabet (see Table 1 ). Several other letters are sanctioned in standard orthography to render direct citation of foreign words, viz., Ç, ç; Ć, ć; Đ, đ; Q , q ; Ś, ś; X , x ; Y , y ; Ź, ź; Ż, ż.
See Table 2 . i , e , ɛ, a , ɔ, o , u occur in long stressed syllables, while stressed ə is always short ( pes [p ə ` s] ‘dog’ ( Sound clip 3 )). In unstressed syllables the distinctions between e– ɛ and o– ɔ are neutralized to ɛ and ɔ respectively: č lovek [tʃl ɔ ` ːvεk] ‘person- nom -sing’ ( Sound clip 4 ), č loveka [tʃlɔv é ːka] ‘person- gen -sing’ ( Sound clip 5 ); potok [p ɔ ` ːtɔk] ‘stream- nom -sing ( Sound clip 6 ),’ potoka [pɔt ó ːka] ‘stream- gen -sing ( Sound clip 7 ).’ The grapheme r between consonants represents a sequence of ə + r , e.g., vrt [vərt] ‘garden ( Sound clip 8 ),’ srce [sərce] ‘heart ( Sound clip 9 ).’
Table 2 . Standard Slovene vowel phonemes
Standard Slovene pronunciation allows two accentual norms, one with pitch accent (characteristic of the Carniolan dialects), the other by stress and vowel length. In the pitch accent system, any long-stressed syllable – almost always only one per accented word – is characterized by either a low rising tone or a high falling tone. Accented words (i.e., not unstressed particles, prepositions, conjunctions, and some pronouns) that lack a long-stressed vowel are short stressed (phonetically high falling) on the final syllable, for example, brati [bráːti] ‘to read’ (low rising) ( Sound clip 10 ), brat [bràːt] ‘to go read’ (high falling) ( Sound clip 11 ), brat [bràt] ‘brother’ (short) ( Sound clip 12 ), poskòk ‘hop’ (short) ( Sound clip 13 ).
Stress patterns are morphophonemic in that each morpheme carries an underlying prosodic marker and the concatenation of morphemes to form words determines realization of the placement and identity of the pitch and quantity. The realization of these concatenation rules is that paradigms are characterized either by fixed or by mobile stress patterns, e.g., fixed: mesto [méːsto] ‘town- nom/acc -sing’– mesta [méːsta] ‘town- gen -sing’– mestu [méːstu] ‘town- dat -sing’; mobile: meso [mesòː] ‘meat- nom/acc -sing’– mesa [mesàː] ‘meat- gen -sing’– mesu [méːsu] ‘meat- dat -sing.’
See Table 3 . V is pronounced as English v only when it precedes a vowel; otherwise, it is pronounced similarly to w : cerkve ‘church- gen -sing ( Sound clip 14 ),’ cerkev [-kəw] ‘church- nom -sing’ ( Sound clip 15 ); vrag [wrak] ‘devil’ ( Sound clip 16 ); navkreber [-wk-] ‘uphill ( Sound clip 17 ).’ L is usually pronounced as w in word-final position and before a consonant (except in some morphologically conditioned environments, where it is pronounced as [l]): vedela ‘she knew ( Sound clip 18 ),’ vedel [-dew] ‘he knew’ ( Sound clip 19 ); poznavalec [-ləc] ‘connoisseur- nom -sing ( Sound clip 20 ),’ poznavalca [-wca] ‘connoisseur- gen -sing ( Sound clip 21 ).’
Table 3 . Standard Slovene consonant phonemes
Alphabetic notations (e.g., the Roman alphabet) are based on the principle of having one simple symbol to represent each segment. However, many transcription systems are not based on the Roman alphabet, because of the ambiguous values of some of its symbols, or because it has been found preferable to use ‘iconic’ symbols, intended to convey by their shapes the phonetic nature of the sound concerned, and/or to link related groups of sounds. One variety of iconic notation has been called ‘organic,’ because the shapes of its symbols are meant to suggest the organs of speech used to produce them. Shorthand systems characteristically are non-Roman and iconic, but not necessarily organic. Iconic systems have a number of drawbacks. Apart from the difficulties of reading and printing them, they cannot be easily expanded to incorporate sounds newly encountered. It is also less easy to adapt them as and when phonetic theory undergoes changes.
The Yoruba writing system uses the Roman alphabet, augmented by letters with diacritics. The earliest written records include the vocabularies compiled by Thomas Bowdich in 1819 (including words for the numerals 1–10), by Hannah Kilham (1828), and by Wilhelm Koelle (1854; see Koelle, Sigismund Wilhelm (1823–1902) ). The teaching booklets of John Raban (1830–1832) and the vocabularies and grammars of Samuel Crowther (1843, 1852; see Crowther, Samuel Ajayi (1806/08-1891) ) contributed further to the written record. Publication of Crowther's school primer (1849; written wholly in Yoruba) was followed by the various translation works in the Old and the New Testaments by Crowther (1950–1956) and by Thomas King (1957–1961). The first vernacular periodical, the newspaper Ìwé Ìròhìn , was printed at Abėokuta from 1859 to 1867 (see, in particular, Hair (1967) ).
Subatomic particles are represented by lowercase Latin or Greek letters. Commonly used symbols for subatomic particles are listed in Part Three, Section D1.6 .
Electric charge for a subatomic particle is indicated by a superscript of the corresponding charge. A p or e used without charge notation refers to a positive proton and a negative electron.
Electron shells are signified by the uppercase letters K, L, M, and N.
Electron subshells and atomic orbitals are signified by the lowercase roman letters s, p, d, and f. Principal energy levels 1 through 7 are written to the left of the letter. The orbital axes are specified with italic subscripts, and the number of electrons in each orbital is written next to the letter as a superscript.
The electron configuration of iron is 1s 2 2s 2 2p 6 3s 2 3p 6 4s 2 3d 6 .
Greek letters are used to indicate some bonding orbitals and the bonds they create.
The electronic state of the atom, representing the angular momentum quantum number L , is denoted with the uppercase roman letters S, P, D, F, G, H, I, and K. The letters represent the L values 0 through 7, respectively. The same letters in lowercase are used to denote the orbital angular momentum of a specific electron. A superscript to the left of the letter represents the spin multiplicity, and a subscript to the right of the letter indicates the total angular momentum quantum number J .
The electronic state of the molecule is denoted with the uppercase roman letters A, B, E, and T, with the ground state X. The same letters in lowercase are used to denote one-electron orbitals. A subscript to the right of the letter is used to express the symmetry of the orbital. A tilde (∼) over the letter is used to indicate polyatomic molecules.
(The complete list of chemical elements and their symbols can be found in the periodic table, explained beginning on the next page and appearing on pages 000–000 .)
The names of chemical elements and chemical compounds are written in roman type and treated as common nouns, whether they are named after proper nouns or not.
The symbols of chemical elements are written in roman type, and the first letter of the symbol is capitalized.
When using the symbol for a chemical element, the name of the element is pronounced. Therefore, when writing using chemical
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