&
'Phags-pa script
Á
Ä
Å
Æ
É
Í
Ñ
Ó
Ö
Ú
Ü
ß
Œ
Śāradā script
1553
A
ASCII
Abbreviation
Abjad
Abjad numerals
Abugida
Acute accent
Adangme language
Afaka script
Africa
African reference alphabet
African studies
Ahom script
Allography
Alphabet
Alphabets derived from the Latin
Americas
Anatolian hieroglyphs
Ancient Rome
Arab
Arabic alphabet
Aramaic alphabet
Armenian alphabet
Asia
Attic numerals
Austronesian languages
Avestan alphabet
Azerbaijan
Azerbaijani language
Azeri
Aztec writing
B
Bahasa Malaysia
Balinese script
Baltic languages
Bashkirs
Basic modern Latin alphabet
Bassa script
Batak script
Baybayin
Beitha Kukju
Bhattiprolu Script
Blissymbols
Bopomofo
Boyd's syllabic shorthand
Brāhmī script
Brahmic family
Brahmic family of scripts
Braille
Breton language
Buhid script
Burmese script
C
C'h (trigraph)
Cœlacanth
Calculator spelling
Calligraphy
Cambridge University Press
Canadian Aboriginal syllabics
Capital letters
Capitalization
Carmenta
Carolingian minuscule
Celtiberian script
Celtic languages
Central Europe
Chữ Nôm
Ch (digraph)
Chakma script
Cham script
Character encoding
Cherokee syllabary
Chinese character
Chinese script
Christian evangelism
Chu nom
Cimmerian Sibyl
Classical Latin
Claudian letters
Claudius
Collating sequence
Collation
Consonant
'Phags-pa script
Á
Ä
Å
Æ
É
Í
Ñ
Ó
Ö
Ú
Ü
ß
Œ
Śāradā script
1553
A
ASCII
Abbreviation
Abjad
Abjad numerals
Abugida
Acute accent
Adangme language
Afaka script
Africa
African reference alphabet
African studies
Ahom script
Allography
Alphabet
Alphabets derived from the Latin
Americas
Anatolian hieroglyphs
Ancient Rome
Arab
Arabic alphabet
Aramaic alphabet
Armenian alphabet
Asia
Attic numerals
Austronesian languages
Avestan alphabet
Azerbaijan
Azerbaijani language
Azeri
Aztec writing
B
Bahasa Malaysia
Balinese script
Baltic languages
Bashkirs
Basic modern Latin alphabet
Bassa script
Batak script
Baybayin
Beitha Kukju
Bhattiprolu Script
Blissymbols
Bopomofo
Boyd's syllabic shorthand
Brāhmī script
Brahmic family
Brahmic family of scripts
Braille
Breton language
Buhid script
Burmese script
C
C'h (trigraph)
Cœlacanth
Calculator spelling
Calligraphy
Cambridge University Press
Canadian Aboriginal syllabics
Capital letters
Capitalization
Carmenta
Carolingian minuscule
Celtiberian script
Celtic languages
Central Europe
Chữ Nôm
Ch (digraph)
Chakma script
Cham script
Character encoding
Cherokee syllabary
Chinese character
Chinese script
Christian evangelism
Chu nom
Cimmerian Sibyl
Classical Latin
Claudian letters
Claudius
Collating sequence
Collation
Consonant
This article includes a list of references, related reading or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please improve this article by introducing more precise citations where appropriate. (January 2009)
Latin alphabet
Type
Alphabet
Spoken languages
Latin, Romance languages, and Modern Germanic Languages; most languages of Europe; many other languages; Romanizations exist for practically all known languages.
Time period
~700 BC–present
Parent systems
Egyptian hieroglyphs
Proto-Sinaitic
Phoenician alphabet
Greek alphabet
Etruscan alphabet
Latin alphabet
Child systems
Numerous: see Alphabets derived from the Latin
Sister systems
Cyrillic
Coptic
Armenian
Runic/Futhark
Unicode range
See Latin characters in Unicode
ISO 15924
Latn
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols.
History of the alphabet
Proto-Sinaitic alphabet 19 c. BCE
Ugaritic 15 c. BCE
Proto-Canaanite 14 c. BCE
Phoenician 12 c. BCE
Paleo-Hebrew 10 c. BCE
Samaritan 6 c. BCE
Aramaic 8 c. BCE
Kharoṣṭhī 6 c. BCE
Brāhmī & Indic 6 c. BCE
Bhattiprolu Script
Telugu Script
Brahmic abugidas
Devanagari 13 c. CE
Hebrew 3 c. BCE
Thaana 4 c. BCE
Pahlavi 3 c. BCE
Avestan 4 c. CE
Palmyrene 2 c. BCE
Syriac 2 c. BCE
Sogdian 2 c. BCE
Orkhon (Old Turkic) 6 c. CE
Old Hungarian ca. 650
Old Uyghur
Mongolian 1204 hh
Nabataean 2 c. BCE
Arabic 4 c. CE
Mandaic 2 c. CE
Greek 8 c. BCE
Etruscan 8 c. BCE
Latin 7 c. BCE
Runic 2 c. CE
Coptic 3 c. CE
Gothic 3 c. CE
Armenian 405
Georgian 3 c. BCE
Glagolitic 862
Cyrillic ca. 940
Paleohispanic 7 c. BCE
Epigraphic South Arabian 9 c. BCE
Ge’ez 5–6 c. BCE
Meroitic 3 c. BCE
Ogham 4 c. CE
Hangul 1443
Zhuyin (Bopomofo) 1913
Complete writing systems genealogy
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The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. It evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was borrowed and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome, whose alphabet was then adapted and further modified by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language.
During the Middle Ages, it was adapted to the Romance languages, the direct descendants of Latin, as well as to the Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, and some Slavic languages, and finally to most of the languages of Europe.
With the age of colonialism and Christian evangelism, the Latin alphabet was spread overseas, and applied to Indigenous American, Indigenous Australian, Austronesian, East Asian, and African languages. More recently, western linguists have also tended to prefer the Latin alphabet or the International Phonetic Alphabet (itself largely based on the Latin alphabet) when transcribing or creating written standards for non-European languages, such as the African reference alphabet.
Kyiv road signs to have Latin alphabet transliteration by Euro 2012
Signs on buildings and road signs in Kyiv are to be renewed, and building fronts, architecture monuments will be renovated as part of the city's preparations for hosting the finals of the Euro 2012 European Football Championship, the city administration has announced.
Latin alphabet
Numerous: see Alphabets derived from the Latin. Sister systems ... The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic ...
In modern usage, the term Latin alphabet is used for any direct derivation of the alphabet first used to write Latin. These variants may discard letters from the classical Roman script (like the Rotokas alphabet) or add new characters to it, as from the Danish and Norwegian alphabet. Letter shapes have changed over the centuries, including the creation of entirely new lower case characters.
Contents
1 History
1.1 Origins
1.2 Medieval and later developments
1.3 Spread
2 Extensions
2.1 Ligatures
2.2 Wholly new letters
2.3 Digraphs and trigraphs
2.4 Diacritics
2.5 Collation
3 Romanization
4 English alphabet
5 Latin alphabet and international standards
6 See also
7 Further reading
//
History
Main article: History of the Latin alphabet
Origins
It is generally believed that the Romans adopted the Cumae alphabet, a variant of the Greek alphabet, in the 7th century BC from Cumae, a Greek colony in Southern Italy. (Gaius Julius Hyginus in Fab. 277 mentions the legend that it was Carmenta, the Cimmerian Sibyl, who altered fifteen letters of the Greek alphabet to become the Latin alphabet, which her son Evander introduced into Latium, supposedly 60 years before the Trojan War, but there is no historically sound basis to this tale.) The Ancient Greek alphabet was in turn based upon the Phoenician alphabet. From the Cumae alphabet, the Etruscan alphabet was derived and the Romans eventually adopted 21 of the original 26 Etruscan letters:
Archaic Latin alphabet
𐌀
𐌁
𐌂
𐌃
𐌄
𐌅
𐌆
𐌇
𐌈
𐌉
𐌊
𐌋
𐌌
𐌍
𐌎
𐌏
𐌐
𐌑
𐌒
𐌓
𐌔
𐌕
𐌖
𐌗
𐌘
𐌙
𐌜
𐌚
A
B
C
D
E
F
Z
H
I
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
V
X
The letter ‹C› was the western form of the Greek gamma, but it was used for the sounds /ɡ/ and /q/ alike, possibly under the influence of Etruscan, which lacked any voiced plosives. Later, probably during the 3rd century BC, the letter ‹Z› — unneeded to write Latin proper — was replaced with the new letter ‹G›, a ‹C› modified with a small vertical stroke, which took its place in the alphabet. From then on, ‹G› represented the voiced plosive /ɡ/, while ‹C› was generally reserved for the voiceless plosive /k/. The letter ‹K› was used only rarely, in a small number of words such as Kalendae, often interchangeably with ‹C›.
After the Roman conquest of Greece in the 1st century BC, Latin adopted the Greek letters ‹Y› and ‹Z› (or readopted, in the latter case) to write Greek loanwords, placing them at the end of the alphabet. An attempt by the emperor Claudius to introduce three additional letters did not last. Thus it was that during the classical Latin period the Latin alphabet contained 23 letters:
Classical Latin alphabet
Letter
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
Name
ā
bē
cē
dē
ē
ef
gē
hā
Pronunciation (IPA)
/aː/
/beː/
/keː/
/deː/
/eː/
/ef/
/geː/
/haː/
Letter
I
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
Name
ī
kā
el
em
en
ō
pē
qū
Pronunciation (IPA)
/iː/
/kaː/
/el/
/em/
/en/
/oː/
/peː/
/kʷuː/
Letter
R
S
T
V
X
Y
Z
Name
er
es
tē
ū
ex
ī Graeca
zēta
Pronunciation (IPA)
/er/
/es/
/teː/
/uː/
/eks/
/iː ˈgrajka/
/ˈzeːta/
The Duenos inscription, dated to the 6th century BC, shows the earliest known forms of the Old Latin alphabet.
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Latin alphabet: Definition from Answers.com
Latin alphabet n. The Roman alphabet adopted from the Greek by way of the Etruscan alphabet, consisting of 23 letters and forming the basis of
The Latin names of some of these letters are disputed. In general, however, the Romans did not use the traditional (Semitic-derived) names as in Greek: the names of the plosives were formed by adding /eː/ to their sound (except for ‹K› and ‹Q›, which needed different vowels to be distinguished from ‹C›) and the names of the continuants consisted either of the bare sound, or the sound preceded by /e/. The letter ‹Y› when introduced was probably called "hy" /hyː/ as in Greek, the name upsilon not being in use yet, but this was changed to "i Graeca" (Greek i) as Latin speakers had difficulty distinguishing its foreign sound /y/ from /i/. ‹Z› was given its Greek name, zeta. For the Latin sounds represented by the various letters see Latin spelling and pronunciation; for the names of the letters in English see English alphabet.
Old Roman cursive script, also called majuscule cursive and capitalis cursive, was the everyday form of handwriting used for writing letters, by merchants writing business accounts, by schoolchildren learning the Latin alphabet, and even emperors issuing commands. A more formal style of writing was based on Roman square capitals, but cursive was used for quicker, informal writing. It was most commonly used from about the 1st century BC to the 3rd century, but it probably existed earlier than that. It led to Uncial, a majuscule script commonly used from the 3rd to 8th centuries AD by Latin and Greek scribes.
New Roman cursive script, also known as minuscule cursive, was in use from the 3rd century to the 7th century, and uses letter forms that are more recognizable to modern eyes; ‹a›, ‹b›, ‹d›, and ‹e› had taken a more familiar shape, and the other letters were proportionate to each other. This script evolved into the medieval scripts known as Merovingian and Carolingian minuscule.
Medieval and later developments
Dutch penny from 1553
De chalco graphiae inventio (1541, Mainz) with the 23 letters. W, U and J are missing.
It was not until the Middle Ages that the letter ‹W› (originally a ligature of two ‹V›s) was added to the Latin alphabet, to represent sounds from the Germanic languages which did not exist in medieval Latin, and only after the Renaissance did the convention of treating ‹I› and ‹U› as vowels, and ‹J› and ‹V› as consonants, become established. Prior to that, the former had been merely allographs of the latter.
With the fragmentation of political power, the style of writing changed and varied greatly throughout the Middle Ages, even after the invention of the printing press. Early deviations from the classical forms were the uncial script, a development of the Old Roman cursive, and various so-called minuscule scripts that developed from New Roman cursive, of which the Carolingian minuscule was the most influential, introducing the lower case forms of the letters, as well as other writing conventions that have since become standard.
The ñ
A sign of yesterday, today and tomorrow By Jim Estrada Poet, statesman and writer Victor Hugo wrote: “Human society, the world, and the whole of mankind is to be found in the alphabet.” That may be why the ABCs represent the fundamental elements, principles, or basics about any subject — in English. To [...]
Online Encyclopedia and Dictionary - Latin alphabet
The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used ... The Latin alphabet spread from Italy, along with the Latin language, to the ...
The languages that use the Latin alphabet today generally use capital letters to begin paragraphs and sentences and proper nouns. The rules for capitalization have changed over time, and different languages have varied in their rules for capitalization. Old English, for example, was rarely written with even proper nouns capitalized; whereas Modern English of the 18th century had frequently all nouns capitalized, in the same way that Modern German is written today, e.g. "Alle Schwestern der alten Stadt hatten die Vögel gesehen".
Spread
The Latin alphabet spread, along with the Latin language, from the Italian Peninsula to the lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea with the expansion of the Roman Empire. The eastern half of the Empire, including Greece, Turkey, the Levant, and Egypt, continued to use Greek as a lingua franca, but Latin was widely spoken in the western half, and as the western Romance languages evolved out of Latin, they continued to use and adapt the Latin alphabet.
With the spread of Western Christianity during the Middle Ages, the alphabet was gradually adopted by the peoples of northern Europe who spoke Celtic languages (displacing the Ogham alphabet) or Germanic languages (displacing earlier Runic alphabets), Baltic languages, as well as by the speakers of several Finno-Ugric languages, most notably Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian. The alphabet also came into use for writing the West Slavic languages and several South Slavic languages, as the people who spoke them adopted Roman Catholicism. The speakers of East Slavic languages generally adopted the Cyrillic alphabet along with Orthodox Christianity. The Serbian language uses both alphabets, with Cyrillic predominating in official (and Latin in everyday) communication.
As late as 1492, the Latin alphabet was limited primarily to the languages spoken in Western, Northern, and Central Europe. The Orthodox Christian Slavs of Eastern and Southeastern Europe mostly used the Cyrillic alphabet, and the Greek alphabet was in use by Greek-speakers around the eastern Mediterranean. The Arabic alphabet was widespread within Islam, both among Arabs and non-Arab nations like the Iranians, Indonesians, Malays, and Turkic peoples. Most of the rest of Asia used a variety of Brahmic alphabets or the Chinese script.
Latin alphabet world distribution. The dark green areas shows the countries where this alphabet is the sole main script. The light green shows the countries where the alphabet co-exists with other scripts. Please note that the Latin alphabet is sometimes extensively used even in areas coloured grey due to use of unofficial second languages (e.g. French in Algeria or English in Egypt) and Latin transliterations of the official language (practised to some degree in most countries with a non-Latin alphabet, e.g., pinyin in China).
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Latin-derived alphabet - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A Latin-derived alphabet is an alphabetical writing system that uses letters of the ... The basic modern Latin alphabet is the most well known Latin-derived alphabet. ...
Over the past 500 years, the Latin alphabet has spread around the world, to the Americas, Oceania, and parts of Asia, Africa, and the Pacific with European colonization, along with the Spanish, Portuguese, English, French, Swedish and Dutch languages. The Latin alphabet is also used for many Austronesian languages, including Tagalog and the other languages of the Philippines, and the official Malaysian and Indonesian languages, replacing earlier Arabic and indigenous Brahmic alphabets. Some glyph forms from the Latin alphabet served as the basis for the forms of the symbols in the Cherokee syllabary developed by Sequoyah; however, the sounds of the final syllabary were completely different. L. L. Zamenhof used the Latin alphabet as the basis for the alphabet of Esperanto. The Latin alphabet was chosen for the Ido language due to its global predominance.
In the late nineteenth century, the Romanians adopted the Latin alphabet, primarily because Romanian is a Romance language. The Romanians were predominantly Orthodox Christians, and their Church had promoted the Cyrillic alphabet prior to that.
Under French rule and Portuguese missionary influence, the Latin alphabet was adapted for writing the Vietnamese language, which had previously used Chinese-like characters.
In 1928, as part of Kemal Atatürk's reforms, Turkey adopted the Latin alphabet for the Turkish language, replacing the Arabic alphabet. Most of Turkic-speaking peoples of the former USSR, including Tartars, Bashkirs, Azeri, Kazakh, Kyrgyz and others, used the Latin-based Uniform Turkic alphabet in the 1930s, but in the 1940s all those alphabets were replaced by Cyrillic. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, several of the newly independent Turkic-speaking republics, namely Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, as well as Romanian-speaking Moldova, have officially adopted the Latin alphabet for Azeri, Uzbek, Turkmen, Kazakh, Tatar, and Romanian respectively. Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and the breakaway region of Transnistria kept the Cyrillic alphabet, chiefly due to their close ties with Russia. In the same periods during the 1930s and 1940s, the majority of Kurds throughout the Kurdistan region replaced their use of the Arabic alphabet for writing in the Kurdish language by adopting two forms of the Latin alphabet.
Although today the only official Kurdish government located in Iraq uses the Arabic alphabet for public documents, the Latin alphabet remains widely used throughout the region by the majority of Kurdish-speakers.
Extensions
Main article: Latin-derived alphabet
In the course of its use, the Latin alphabet was adapted for use in new languages, sometimes representing phonemes not found in languages that were already written with the Roman characters. To represent these new sounds, extensions were therefore created, be it by adding diacritics to existing letters, by joining multiple letters together to make ligatures, by creating completely new forms, or by assigning a special function to pairs or triplets of letters. These new forms are given a place in the alphabet by defining an alphabetical order or collation sequence, which can vary with the particular language.
Ligatures
Main article: Ligature (typography)
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Latin-Alphabet
The Latin (or, as it is also called, Roman) alphabet appeared in the 7th century BC as an adaptation of the Etruscan alphabet to the Latin language. ...
A ligature is a fusion of two or more ordinary letters into a new glyph or character. Examples are ‹Æ/æ› (from ‹AE›, called "ash"), ‹Œ/œ› (from ‹OE›, sometimes called "oethel"), the abbreviation ‹&› (from Latin et "and"), and the German symbol ‹ß› ("sharp S" or "eszet", from ‹ſz› or ‹ſs›, the archaic medial form of ‹s›, followed by a ‹z› or ‹s›).
Wholly new letters
Main article: List of Latin letters
Some examples of new letters to the standard Latin alphabet are the Runic letters wynn ‹Ƿ/ƿ› and thorn ‹Þ/þ›, and the Irish letter eth ‹Ð/ð›, which were added to the alphabet of Old English. Another Irish letter, the insular g, developed into yogh ‹Ȝ/ȝ›, used in Middle English. Wynn was later replaced with the new letter ‹w›, eth and thorn with ‹th›, and yogh with ‹gh›. Although the four are no longer part of the English or Irish alphabets, eth and thorn are still used in the modern Icelandic alphabet and Faroese alphabet.
Some West, Central and Southern African languages use a few additional letters which have a similar sound value to their equivalents in the IPA. For example, Adangme uses the letters ‹Ɛ/ɛ› and ‹Ɔ/ɔ›, and Ga uses ‹Ɛ/ɛ›, ‹Ŋ/ŋ› and ‹Ɔ/ɔ›. Hausa uses ‹Ɓ/ɓ› and ‹Ɗ/ɗ› for implosives, and ‹Ƙ/ƙ› for an ejective. Africanists have standardized these into the African reference alphabet.
Digraphs and trigraphs
Main articles: Digraph and Trigraph
A digraph is a pair of letters used to write one sound or a combination of sounds that does not correspond to the written letters in sequence. Examples are ‹ch›, ‹rh›, ‹sh› in English, or the ‹Dutch ij› (note that ‹ij› is capitalized as ‹IJ› or the ligature ‹IJ› and sometimes as the single letter ‹Y› despite it is a different letter, but never as ‹Ij›, and that it often takes the appearance of a ligature ‹ij› very similar to the letter ‹ÿ› in handwriting). A trigraph is made up of three letters, like the German ‹sch›, the Breton ‹c’h› or the Milanese ‹oeu›. In the orthographies of some languages, digraphs and trigraphs are regarded as independent letters of the alphabet in their own right. The capitalization of digraphs and trigraphs is language-dependent, as only on the first letter may be capitalized, or all component letters simultaneously even for words written in titlecase only where the other non-initial letters after the digraph or trigraph are left in lowercase.
Diacritics
The letter ‹a› with an acute Diacritic.
Main article: Diacritic
A diacritic, in some cases also called an accent, is a small symbol which can appear above or below a letter, or in some other position, such as the umlaut sign used in the German characters ‹Ä›, ‹Ö›, ‹Ü›. Its main function is to change the phonetic value of the letter to which it is added, but it may also modify the pronunciation of a whole syllable or word, or distinguish between homographs. As with letters, the value of diacritics is language-dependent.
Collation
Main article: Collating sequence
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Latin alphabet - Definition
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Latin alphabet became the standard script for a number of non-European languages as well. Contents ...
Modified letters such as the symbols ‹Å›, ‹Ä›, and ‹Ö› may be regarded as new individual letters in themselves, and assigned a specific place in the alphabet for collation purposes, separate from that of the letter on which they are based, as is done in Swedish. In other cases, such as with ‹Ä›, ‹Ö›, ‹Ü› in German, this is not done, letter-diacritic combinations being identified with their base letter. The same applies to digraphs and trigraphs. Different diacritics may be treated differently in collation within a single language. For example, in Spanish the character ‹Ñ› is considered a letter in its own, and sorted between ‹N› and ‹O› in dictionaries, but the accented vowels ‹Á›, ‹É›, ‹Í›, ‹Ó›, ‹Ú› are not separated from the unaccented vowels ‹A›, ‹E›, ‹I›, ‹O›, ‹U›.
Romanization
Main article: Romanization
Words from languages natively written with other scripts, such as Arabic or Chinese, are usually transliterated or transcribed when embedded in Latin text or in multilingual international communication, a process termed Romanization.
Whilst the Romanization of such languages is used mostly at unofficial levels, it has been especially prominent in computer messaging where only the limited 7-bit ASCII code is available on older systems. However, with the introduction of Unicode, Romanization is now becoming less necessary. Note that keyboards used to enter such text may still restrict users to Romanized text, as only ASCII or Latin-alphabet characters may be available.
English alphabet
Main article: English alphabet
As used in modern English, the Latin alphabet consists of the following characters
Majuscule Forms (also called uppercase or capital letters)
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
Minuscule Forms (also called lowercase or small letters)
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
In addition, the ligatures ‹Æ› of ‹A› with ‹E› (e.g. "encyclopædia"), and ‹Œ› of ‹O› with ‹E› (e.g. "cœlacanth") may be used, optionally, in words derived from Latin or Greek, and the diaeresis mark is sometimes placed for example on the letters ‹o› and ‹e› (e.g. "coöperate" or "preëxisting") to indicate the pronunciation of ‹oo› or ‹ee› as two distinct vowels, rather than a long one. Hyphenation may also be used, to avoid having to type accented characters: "co-operate" or "pre-existing". Outside of professional papers on specific subjects that traditionally use ligatures in loanwords, however, ligatures and diaereses are seldom used in modern English. Note, however, that some fonts for typesetting English contain commonly used ligatures, such as for ‹tt›, ‹fi›, ‹fl›, ‹ffi›, and ‹ffl›. These are not independent letters, but rather allographs.
Latin alphabet and international standards
Main article: Basic modern Latin alphabet
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Ancient and modern Latin alphabet
Details of the development of the Latin alphabet from it's beginnings in Ancient Rome to today
By the 1960s it became apparent to the computer and telecommunications industries in the First World that a non-proprietary method of encoding characters was needed. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) encapsulated the Latin alphabet in their (ISO/IEC 646) standard. To achieve widespread acceptance, this encapsulation was based on popular usage. As the United States held a preeminent position in both industries during the 1960s the standard was based on the already published American Standard Code for Information Interchange, better known as ASCII, which included in the character set the 26 x 2 letters of the English alphabet. Later standards issued by the ISO, for example ISO/IEC 10646 (Unicode Latin), have continued to define the 26 x 2 letters of the English alphabet as the basic Latin alphabet with extensions to handle other letters in other languages.
The ISO basic Latin alphabetv · d · e
Aa
Bb
Cc
Dd
Ee
Ff
Gg
Hh
Ii
Jj
Kk
Ll
Mm
Nn
Oo
Pp
Qq
Rr
Ss
Tt
Uu
Vv
Ww
Xx
Yy
Zz
history • palaeography • derivations • diacritics • punctuation • numerals • Unicode • list of letters • ISO/IEC 646
See also
Alphabets derived from the Latin
Beghilos (Calculator spelling)
Calligraphy
Collation
Keyboard layout
Latin characters in Unicode
Latin-1
Legacy of the Roman Empire
List of Latin letters
Palaeography
Penmanship
Phoenician alphabet
Pinyin
Roman letters used in mathematics
Typography
Western Latin character sets (computing)
Further reading
Jensen, Hans (1970). Sign Symbol and Script. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd. ISBN 0-04-400021-9. . Transl. of Jensen, Hans (1958). Die Schrift in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart. Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften. , as revised by the author
Rix, Helmut (1993). "La scrittura e la lingua". In Cristofani, Mauro (hrsg.). Gli etruschi - Una nuova immagine. Firenze: Giunti. pp. S.199–227.
Sampson, Geoffrey (1985). Writing systems. London (etc.): Hutchinson.
Wachter, Rudolf (1987). Altlateinische Inschriften: sprachliche und epigraphische Untersuchungen zu den Dokumenten bis etwa 150 v.Chr. Bern (etc.). : Peter Lang.
W. Sidney Allen (1978). "The names of the letters of the Latin alphabet (Appendix C)". Vox Latina — a guide to the pronunciation of classical Latin. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-22049-1 (Second edition).
Biktaş, Şamil (2003). Tuğan Tel.
Diacritics Project — All you need to design a font with correct accents
Lewis and Short Latin Dictionary on the letter G
Latin-Alphabet
Latin alphabet at omniglot.com
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Alphabets
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Non-linear
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Ideo/Pictograms
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Other logo-syllabic
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Numerals
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Semi-syllabaries
Full
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Syllabaries
Afaka · Cherokee · Cypriot · Geba · Hiragana · Katakana · Kikakui · Kpelle · Linear B · Man'yōgana · Nüshu · Old Persian Cuneiform · Vai · Woleai · Yi · Yugtun
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