In French and English, characters with diaeresis (ä, ë, ï, ö, ü, ÿ) are treated just like their un-accented versions.Languages that use the roman alphabet have varying collating rules: Hausa uses three additional consonants: ɓ, ɗ and ƙ. The Slavic regions which stayed with the Orthodox church generally use Cyrillic instead which is much closer to the Greek alphabet. Among these, Polish uses a variety of ligatures with z to represent special phonetic values, and a dark l - ł - for a sound similar to w. Some Slavic languages use the latin alphabet rather than the Cyrillic. The additional letters added in German are special presentations of earlier ligature forms (ae → ä, ue → ü or ſs → ß).įrench adds the circumflex to record elided consonants that were present in earlier forms and are often still present in the modern English cognate forms (Old French hostel → French hôtel = English hotel or Late Latin pasta → Middle French paste → French pâte and English paste). In modern Icelandic, thorn and edh are still used. In Old English, thorn þ, edh ð and wynn ƿ - a Runic letter - were added. U and J were originally not distinguished from V and I respectively. It was added in late Roman times to represent a Germanic sound. the tilde in Spanish ñ or some Portuguese vowels (originally a little n written above the letter) used to mark the elision of a former N, and then later to mark nasalisation of the base letter.the hacek in Slavonic languages, used to mark palatalised versions of the base letter, e.g.the cedilla in ç (originally a little z written below the c) that symbolized /ts/ in Romance.In the course of its history, the Latin alphabet was used for new languages, and therefore, some new letters and diacritics were created, e.g.: Because 'C' was hard in Classic Latin, 'K' was used for words borrowed from Greek, such as the abbreviations "K." or "Kal." for "kalendae" (the first day of a month). They didn't have the letter 'J', instead they had the semi-vowel 'I'. There was no 'W', although 'V' was pronounced as the modern English 'W'. There was no 'U' instead, there was the semi-vowel 'V'. The semi-vowels /w, j/ and the vowels /u, u:, i, i:/ were written with the same letters, namely V and I respectively. G was created approximately in the 3rd century BC by Spurius Carvilius Ruga as a modification of C (Sampson 109).į (digamma) stood for /w/ in both Etruscan and Latin, but the Romans simplified the FH-/f/combination to F /f/. Y and Z were later additions taken from the Greek alphabet. In Etruscan there was no /o/, so Q was used both in front of /o/ and /u/ in Latin.
These spelling rules are due to the names of the letters: gamma or gemma kappa qoppa or quppa (Wachter 15). The letters thus stand for different allophones of /k/ (in the case of Latin, also /g/ and probably the phonemes /k_w/ and /g _w/ in the case of QU and GU). Jensen (521) notes that the letters C, K, Q were originally used in Latin according to Etruscan usage: C in front of /e, i/ K in front of /a/ Q in front of /u, o/. The sound value of C proves that clearly.Įtruscan had no voiced plosives, so this symbol - derived from the Greek gamma - came to stand for the unvoiced /k/ in Etruscan - as later in Latin.
It is uncontested that the alphabet is mainly of Etruscan origin. Rix (203) claims that the sound values of those letters in Latin are to be attributed to Greek influence, the letters themselves were probably all present when the Romans took over the alphabet from the Etruscans (Wachter 33). However, there are Etruscan abecedaria with B, D, O, X (Sampson 108). 7.The Latin alphabet derives mainly from the Etruscan alphabet.Īccording to Hammarström (in Jensen 521), the letters for B, D, O, X hail from a Southern Italian Greek alphabet. Web.ġ933 'NORMAN LINDSAY 'S FACIAL TYPES', Weekly Times (Melbourne, Vic. "NORMAN LINDSAY 'S FACIAL TYPES" Weekly Times (Melbourne, Vic. NORMAN LINDSAY 'S FACIAL TYPES (1933, March 25). Article identifier Page identifier APA citation