The rules for capitalization have changed over time, and different languages have varied in their rules for capitalization. The languages that use the Latin script generally use capital letters to begin paragraphs and sentences and proper nouns. 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 insular script developed by Irish literati & derivations of this, such as Carolingian minuscule were the most influential, introducing the lower case forms of the letters, as well as other writing conventions that have since become standard. 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.
Prior to that, the former had been merely allographs of the latter. 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. Thus it was during the classical Latin period that the Latin alphabet contained 23 letters: An attempt by the emperor Claudius to introduce three additional letters did not last. The letter ⟨K⟩ was used only rarely, in a small number of words such as Kalendae, often interchangeably with ⟨C⟩.Īfter 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. From then on, ⟨G⟩ represented the voiced plosive /ɡ/, while ⟨C⟩ was generally reserved for the voiceless plosive /k/. Later, probably during the 3rd century BC, the letter ⟨Z⟩ – unneeded to write Latin properly – was replaced with the new letter ⟨G⟩, a ⟨C⟩ modified with a small horizontal stroke, which took its place in the alphabet. The letter ⟨C⟩ was the western form of the Greek gamma, but it was used for the sounds /ɡ/ and /k/ alike, possibly under the influence of Etruscan, which might have lacked any voiced plosives. Main article: History of the Latin script Old Italic alphabet Old Italic alphabet LettersĪrchaic Latin alphabet Archaic Latin alphabet are Latin/Roman script numbers for the Hindu–Arabic numeral system.
The numeral system is called the Roman numeral system, and the collection of the elements is known as the Roman numerals. Unicode uses the term "Latin" as does the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). In the context of transliteration, the term " romanization" ( British English: "romanisation") is often found. The script is either called Latin script or Roman script, in reference to its origin in ancient Rome. Latin script is used as the standard method of writing for most Western and Central, and some Eastern, European languages as well as many languages in other parts of the world. Most widely adopted writing system in the world (commonly used by about 70 percent of the world's population). Latin script is the basis for the largest number of alphabets of any writing system and is the
#Latin modern roman iso#
The Latin script is the basis of the International Phonetic Alphabet, and the 26 most widespread letters are the letters contained in the ISO basic Latin alphabet. Several Latin-script alphabets exist, which differ in graphemes, collation and phonetic values from the classical Latin alphabet. The Latin script, also known as Roman script, is an alphabetic writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Cumaean Greek version of the Greek alphabet used by the Etruscans. For the distinction between, / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).