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 and many letters had
several different shapes.
Other versions of the Latin alphabet
Ancient Latin, Irish Uncial, Old English
Roman alphabet for Latin
The Romans used just 23 letters to write Latin:
A B C D E F G H I K L M N O P Q R S T V X Y Z
There were no lower case letters, and K, Y
and Z used only for writing words of Greek origin. The letters
J, U and W were added to the alphabet at a later
stage to write languages other than Latin. J is a variant of
I, U is a variant of V, and W was introduced
as a 'double-v' to make a distinction between the sounds we know as
'v' and 'w' which was unnecessary in Latin.
Modern Latin alphabet
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 @. Many languages
add a variety of accents to
the basic letters, and a few also use extra
letters and ligatures.
The lowercase letters developed from cursive versions of the uppercase letters.
Uppercase
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Lowercase
a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z
Accented letters
Many languages supplement the basic Latin alphabet with a variety of accented letters:
These accented letters can have a number of different functions:
- Modifying the pronunciation of a letter
- Indicating where the stress should fall in a word
- Indicating emphasis in a sentence
- Indicating pitch or intonation of a word or syllable
- Indicating vowel length
- Visually distinguishing homophones
