Latin alphabets to modern Roman alphabets

Looking once more at Boeree's¹ chart of the Evolution of the Greek and Latin alphabets, it is noticeable that the Latin alphabet seems to be "missing" a few letters. Where did the extra ones come from that we use?









It is generally agreed that the Roman alphabet is mainly derived from the Etruscan writing system.

The Letter “C”
Etruscan had no "voiced plosives". In English, b, d and g are voiced plosives, while ph, and th are not. The "plosive" refers to closure of the oral cavity, a build up of pressure with vocal cord vibration, ("voiced"), followed by sudden release. The Etruscan, C, was derived from the Greek gamma. The letter G appeared around 230 BCE.



















Here is another view of the Greek alphabet with lower case versions and approximate English pronunciations:













Early Latin
A B CG D E F(Z) H I K L M N O P Q R S T V Y X

The following is from Omniglot¹
"There were no lowercase letters, and K, Y and Z were only used for writing words of Greek origin. The letters J, U and W were added later 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."

Vajda² is a very useful resource on this. He also discusses the I.P.A. or International Phonetic Alphabet.

Ancient Latin alphabet
A chart from Omniglot(1) shows an even earlier version of the Latin alphabet dating from 6th Century BCE. Here it is called the Ancient Latin alphabet:












Notice the clear Etruscan shape to the letters. It is interesting to note that there were several different shapes for the same letter, bearing in mind that they had no lower case letters.

The earliest Latin inscription is on a cloak pin (a fibula) which was found in Palestrina (Praeneste) in the 6th century BCE. It is now known as the Pranaeste Fibula. Here are two images, the second one enabling the script to be seen more clearly:
























and here is a reversal of the inscription:








The fibula was thought to originate from the 7th century BCE. It is inscribed with a text that appears to be written in Old Latin, here transcribed to English letters:

MANIOS MED FHEFHAKED NVMASIOI

The equivalent Classical Latin sentence obtained by applying the appropriate differences between Old Latin and Classical Latin would probably have been:

MANIVS ME FECIT NVMERIO

translated as:

MANIUS FASHIONED ME FOR NUMERIUS.


Debate continues over whether the inscription was a hoax, perpetrated at the beginning of the 20th century by a German scholar, or not!


Roman alphabet for Latin

Here is the Roman alphabet for Latin. They used only 23 letters.






Modern Latin alphabet
Here is the more familiar version of the alphabet:









It is observed by Omniglot¹ that the lower case versions of the capital letters derived from cursive script variations of the upper case letters.

The Latin alphabet is the "parent" of most Western European alphabets and, as we discussed last time, it comes from the Greek alphabet, and was also influenced by the Etruscan alphabet.. However some, like Vajda¹, see the Greek alphabet as the most important root of modern alphabets.

Looking at the chart here from an earlier post, it can be seen that Ancient Greek was the branching point for two important language streams, apart from Modern Greek. Our alphabet, shown as Modern Roman, is on one branch and on the other is Modern Cyrillic, used by speakers of Russian.





















Future

I suppose it's all about evolution. The April Fool's Day joke I put on the first Post is an example, but how far fetched is it? The joke was that Barack Obama was proposing a new letter, but is this the way change begins?

















Could our alphabet evolve further?

Here is a proposal by Worley¹
"Rethinking the English Alphabet

English spelling is inconsistent, inefficient, and insufficient. Almost the instant English spelling was codified people have wanted to improve it, but found it almost impossible to introduce changes. Perhaps equally troubling, though less commonly addressed, is the English alphabet, full of redundant letters. So, in the spirit of countless orthography reformers, I propose the following changes to the English alphabet.

First, we drop the letter "x". It appears rarely, and when it does it always makes a sound that is either the same as "z" or "ks". Next, since "c" always either sounds like a "k" or an "s", I propose we drop it, too. Third, I propose we drop "q", since it makes the same sound as "k". This leaves us with 23 letters, so I additionally propose we replace "y" by the digraph "ij" to keep the number of letters in English even (this is for the sake of making rot11 symmetric, just as rot13 is today).

This leaves us with "a b d e f g h i j k l m n o p r s t u v w y z", but I want to tweak it a little more. "s" and "5" are easily confused on a blackboard, so let's replace "s" with "c". Similarly, "h" and "k" are often confused, so let's replace "k" with "q". Since "l" and "1" look very similarly, let's replace "l" with "y", and finally let's replace "o" by "x" to eliminate confusion between "o" and "0". So this leaves us with "a b d e f g h i j q y m n x p r s t u v w y z".

My changes require only direct substitutions of letters; the spellings don't change, just the symbols, thus it could easily be accomplished by substitution on the computer to bring electronic texts into the modern spelling. If this alphabet was adopted by schools, we could be using this simplified system in a generation.

I realize, of course, that there is no hope of my improvements taking root; it's simply not better enough to motivate people through the transition. But it ic a fun mentay eksersize!"












the above was written in the font "Brand New Alphabet" by Rachel Spoon @ http://fontstruct.fontshop.com/




---------------------------------------------------------------
Discussion/Reflection


describe the research process for that week

Being the final post it has really been a gentle walk to the finish line. I found a number of references which describe how the Ancient Latin alphabet became the Roman alphabet became the Modern Roman alphabet but I found either the sources to be too brief, or they got way too difficult for an amateur researcher like me. In the end, I had to omit quite a lot of detail about the way the Ancient Latin alphabet was pronounced and the way the Roman alphabet was pronounced due to the linguistic complexity of the discussion. I found this disappointing but inevitable, I suppose. I had to ignore labial fricatives, voiced and non-voiced plosives, and a whole thesis on a language's phonemes - disappointingly! However, I have found some wonderful resources and I have mentioned them later on.


document your research findings so far

People started drawing pictures on cave walls but there was no thought, or metacognition happening. That is, they could not write in a way which expressed insight into their own thinking, as came much later on. There have been so many highlights for me doing this project! The hieroglyphics of Egypt and the origins of the Proto- S(e/i)mitic language, the pervasive influence of varieties of Hebrew on later languages, the amazing Etruscans whose language just disappeared as they became part of Roman civilisation - there have been so many highlights! The main outcomes of the research are that alphabets change because:
* the speakers of the language allow "foreign" words to enter their vocabulary and they need new characters to write them
* the speakers may decide they need say, vowels, because their's is essentially a consonantal alphabet, and other alphabets in nearby countries have the sounds that they want
* the speakers of the language are concerned that their language may be lost as they assimilate the culture of another people - e.g. the speakers of Hebrew added diacritics to their characters for speech and even chanting. The Etruscans, unfortunately, did not take this path.
* over time, letters are omitted from certain words and diacritics are used to signify that this process has occurred e.g. the French omitting the "s" in estude and "inventing" the acute accent to place on the "e".

include a reflection on your research process and any difficulties experienced

The problem this week was how to finish. The concept that "our" alphabet is something set in concrete is quite foreign to me. With the advent of texting and email, many abbreviations have crept into common usage and I wonder how long before further contractions become "accepted" as normal expression? The April 1st joke about Obama's new letter, the "th", started me thinking. Given typography is a growth industry, it is not unlikely that changes are occurring to the way we write letters every day, yet very slowly.

This led me to researching Wim Crouwel's "machine" alphabet from the 1967
(There is also YouTube on this - see right hand side movie clips)


Here is the cover of his "proposed" typeface for computer representations of the alphabet on screens. He didn't like the way curves were pixellated by the early printers and screens and so he "proposed a new font with no curves and only 45 degree angle line segments".





















share your discoveries, good reference resources, website links, podcasts, image or video resources.

For me the most exciting discoveries were:

• there are people in Ethiopia who are using one of the longest unchanged languages in the world. I didn't manage to discuss this in the posts.

• Hebrew wins the prize for the language which has been continuously recorded for the longest time.

• Just because two scripts look the same, doesn't mean that the languages are linguistically related

• Two languages which have very different scripts may be quite closely related, linguistically.

• There are black Americans learning hieroglyphics, via YouTube, so that they can translate original material which they believe is important to their understanding of their own history.

• the website Omniglot.com is an amazing resource. You really must have a look at it. It is also very useful when constructing Dewey numbers because it can tell you which languages are derived from Devangari - quite handy!

--------------------------------------------------------------
References

Bouree¹
Boeree, CG 2009, The evolution of alphabets, Shippensburg University, viewed 17 May 2010, http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/evolalpha.html.

Omniglot¹
Agar, S 2010, (italic)Latin Alphabet(/italic), Omniglot: writing systems & languages of the world, viewed 17 May 2010, http://www.omniglot.com/writing/latin.htm.

Vajda¹
Vajda, E 2006, (italic)The alphabet(/italic), Western Washington University, viewed 17 May 2010,
http://pandora.cii.wwu.edu/vajda/ling201/test4materials/Writing3.htm.

Vajda²
Vajda, E 2006, (italic)Phonetics(/italic), Western Washington University, viewed 17 May 2010,
http://pandora.cii.wwu.edu/vajda/ling201/test2materials/phonetics.htm.

Worley¹
Worley, G 2007, (italic)Rethinking the English Alphabet(/italic), Red Bird Island, viewed 17 May 2010,
http://homepage.mac.com/redbird/personal/E20070407212055/index.html.