Old Italic alphabet LettersĪrchaic Latin alphabet Archaic Latin alphabet The Duenos inscription, dated to the 6th century BC, shows the earliest known forms of the Old Latin alphabet. Hundreds of symbols and abbreviations exist, varying from century to century. This habit continued even in the Middle Ages. This was due to the fact that if the text was engraved on the stone, the number of letters to be written was reduced, while if it was written on paper or parchment, it saved precious space. Furthermore, abbreviations or smaller overlapping letters were often used. More recently, linguists have also tended to prefer the Latin script or the International Phonetic Alphabet (itself largely based on the Latin script) when transcribing or creating written standards for non-European languages, such as the African reference alphabet.Īlthough Latin did not use diacritical signs, signs of truncation of words, often placed above the truncated word or at the end of it, were very common. With the age of colonialism and Christian evangelism, the Latin script spread beyond Europe, coming into use for writing indigenous American, Australian, Austronesian, Austroasiatic and African languages. The Etruscans ruled early Rome their alphabet evolved in Rome over successive centuries to produce the Latin alphabet.ĭuring the Middle Ages, the Latin alphabet was used (sometimes with modifications) for writing Romance languages, which are direct descendants of Latin, as well as Celtic, Germanic, Baltic and some Slavic languages. The Latin alphabet evolved from the visually similar Etruscan alphabet, which evolved from the Cumaean Greek version of the Greek alphabet, which was itself descended from the Phoenician alphabet, which in turn derived from Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Letter shapes have evolved over the centuries, including the development in Medieval Latin of lower-case, forms which did not exist in the Classical period alphabet. These Latin-script alphabets may discard letters, like the Rotokas alphabet, or add new letters, like the Danish and Norwegian alphabets. The term Latin alphabet may refer to either the alphabet used to write Latin (as described in this article) or other alphabets based on the Latin script, which is the basic set of letters common to the various alphabets descended from the classical Latin alphabet, such as the English alphabet. BCEĪdlam (slight influence from Arabic) 1989 CE Caucasian Albanian (origin uncertain) c.Cherokee (syllabary letter forms only) c.
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