Roman alphabet

The Roman alphabet is the alphabet in which the ancient Romans wrote Latin, and for this reason is sometimes known as the Latin alphabet. It is also the alphabet used, with minor variations, by most modern European languages as well as many other languages in other parts of the world.

The Roman alphabet was derived from a version of the Greek alphabet, which in turn was derived from the Phoenician alphabet. The inhabitants of the city of Cumae, a Greek colony founded around 750 BCE on the west coast of Italy near Naples, used a western variant of the Greek alphabet, usually referred to as the Cumaean alphabet. The Etruscans, who lived in Tuscany and in the sixth century BCE were the dominant power in Italy, adapted the Cumaean alphabet for writing their language, and the Romans based their alphabet on the Etruscan alphabet.

The earliest Roman alphabet contained 21 letters: ABCDEFZHIKLMNOPQRSTVX. The majority of these letters represented approximately the same sounds as they do in modern English. However, (i) C represented hard 'g' as well as hard 'c' - the letter G was introduced in the third century BCE to represent hard 'g'; (ii) V represented the vowel 'u'; (iii) Z originally represented voiced 's' (as in the English words 'miser' and 'reside') but was dropped in the fourth century BCE; and (iv) Y was introduced and Z was reintroduced in the first century BCE to represent the Greek letters upsilon (Υ, lower case υ) and zeta (Ζ, lower case ζ) and so enable certain Greek loan words to be written in Latin.

Of the three letters (W, J, and U) which were never part of the alphabet used by the Romans to write Latin, W was added in the Middle Ages for writing various Germanic languages (see also wynn), while the distinctions between I (a vowel) and J (a consonant) and between U (a vowel) and V (a consonant) date from the period after the Renaissance. (See also obsolete letters.)

The alphabet used by the ancient Romans consisted only of capital letters, and what we know as the lower case forms did not exist in the Classical Period. However, different forms of the capitals, which allowed them to be joined together (i.e., a cursive script), were used in handwriting.

With the use of Latin for administrative and other purposes throughout the Western Roman Empire, the inhabitants of much of what is now Western Europe became familiar with the Roman alphabet, and so it was natural that the languages which developed out of Latin in these lands - i.e., the Romance languages, principally, French, Spanish, and Italian - should adopt the Roman alphabet. During the Middle Ages, as Christianity spread beyond what had been the boundaries of the Roman Empire, the Roman alphabet displaced the earlier alphabets used for writing other European languages which did not derive from Latin (e.g., the Germanic - more at runes), Celtic, and some of the Slavonic languages - see further at Cyrillic alphabet). Today the Roman alphabet is used for writing most European languages - the main exceptions are Greek, Russian, and Bulgarian - as well as many languages in Asia and Africa.