Latin alphabet

“ The change of d between vowels to a sound akin to r, written by a special symbol ꟼ (ḍ) in Umbrian alphabet and by RS in Latin alphabet, e.g. teḍa in Umbrian alphabet = dirsa in Latin alphabet (see below) , “let him give,” exactly equivalent to Paelignian dida (see Paeligni) . ”

“ Alphabet, Christian Use of the.—The Hebrew, Greek, and Latin alphabets have been variously made use of in Christian liturgy. During Holy Week the Hebrew alphabet is sung, each of its letters preceding one of the verses of the Lamentations of Jeremias at Matins ”

“ Sounds are what we actually utter with our voices and hear with our ears when we are speaking a language. Letters are the signs which we use to represent the sounds when we are writing it down. It often happens that the letters do not represent the sounds exactly. Sometimes different sounds are represented by the same letter, sometimes the same sound is represented by different letters.
§ 6.The English and the Latin Alphabets.—The English alphabet was originally taken from the Latin alphabet, and the letters in it had the same sounds as in Latin. ”

“ The enigma as to how the Latins came to employ the Greek sign corresponding to -v for the -f quite different in sound, has been solved by the bracelet of Praeneste (xiv. Developments Of Alphabets in Italy, note) with its -fhefhaked- for -fecit-, and thereby at the same time the derivation of the Latin alphabet from the Chalcidian colonies of Lower Italy has been confirmed. For in a Boeotian inscription belonging to the same alphabet we find in the word -fhekadamoe- (Gustav Meyer, Griech. Grammatik, sec. 244, ap. fin.) ”

“ With T we reach the end of the original Phœnician alphabet. The remaining symbols—no fewer than six with us, four in the completed Latin alphabet—are accretions, either modifications of old symbols for greater exactness or old symbols themselves which had fallen out of their proper place and were added again. The first new symbol was needed to represent the important vowel sound u. We have already seen that the Greeks employed the Phœnician symbols for the breaths which they did not want as symbols for the vowels which they did want. ”

“ The later alphabets—Parsi, Hebrew, Syriac, Mongolian, and Arabic—were at first local varieties of the Aramean. Owing to accidental circumstances they became the sacred scripts of the five great faiths of Asia—Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, Northern Buddhism, and Islam. Hence the descendants of the Aramean alphabet occupy a space on the map second only to that filled by the Latin alphabet itself. ”

“ While the ancient Greek alphabet gave rise to the ordinary Greek alphabet and the Latin, the Greek alphabet of later times furnished elements for the Coptic, the Gothic, and the old Slavic alphabets. The Latin characters are now employed by a great many nations, such as the Italian, the French, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the English, the Dutch, the German, the Hungarian, the Polish, &c., each nation having introduced such modifications or additions as are necessary to express the sound of the language peculiar to it. ”

“ These they called casæ litterarum, and included the whole Latin alphabet, the X (decussio) being the most important letter of their system. It is evident, therefore, that the liturgical rite has grown up out of a practice borrowed from the land-surveyors, though we cannot say what alterations it may have undergone in passing from that guild to the Church. In course of time, when the rite lost its meaning, a mystical signification was attached to it. After the ninth century the reason for using the two alphabets was no longer understood ”

“ The English alphabet, like most of those of modern Europe, is derived directly from the Latin, the Latin from the ancient Greek, and that from the Phœnician, which again is believed to have had its origin in the Egyptian hieroglyphics, although Egyptologists are not unanimous on this point. ”

“ In the Latin alphabet the sound was always the voiced stop (as in gig) in classical times. Later, before e, g passed into a sound like the English y, so that words begin indifferently with g or j; hence from the Lat. ”

“ The Phœnician alphabet did not altogether suit the writers of Greek and Latin, who altered some letters and made new ones in order to write their languages more perfectly, and thus other nations have made free in adding, dropping, and altering letters and their sounds, to get the means required for each to express its own tongue. ”

“ These defects, it may be said, once for all, the English alphabet shares with those of the rest of the world; although, with the doubtful exception of the French, it possesses them in a higher degree than any.
With few, if any, exceptions, all the modes of writing in the world originate, directly or indirectly, from the Phœnician, Hebrew, or Semitic alphabet. This is easily accounted for when we call to mind,—1. The fact that the Greek, the Latin, and the Arabian alphabets, are all founded upon this ”

“ Some scholars hold that it is derived from the "Phœnician" alphabet; others say that it comes from the Latin. Canon Taylor has a definite theory that it is a degraded form of the Greek alphabet; for in the sixth century b.c. the Goths swarmed in the region south of the Baltic and east of the Vistula, and in their trading relations with Greek colonists north of the Black Sea may readily have obtained a knowledge of the Greek alphabet. The question, however, of origin remains, and is likely to remain, unsettled. ”

“ Many authorities therefore contend that F is only a modification of the preceding symbol E and has nothing to do with the symbol Vau. In some early Latin inscriptions F is represented by ||, as E is by ||. It must be admitted that the resemblance between the sixth symbol of the Phoenician alphabet and the corresponding symbol of the European alphabet is not striking. But the position of the limbs of symbols in early alphabets often varies surprisingly. ”

“ The primal cause of the chaotic condition of English orthography, is the fact that the Roman alphabet, which was a perfect phonography of the old Latin language, lacked characters for four English vowels and four English consonants. ”

“ The English language shows the magic force
Of blended beauties cull’d from every source. The Alphabet “The Egyptian Origin of our Alphabet” was the subject of a paper read before the New York Academy of Sciences by Dr. Charles E. Moldeuke, the Egyptologist. Two large charts on the wall showed in forty parallel columns the evolution of the various letters of the alphabet from the Egyptian hieroglyph through the Phœnician, Hebrew, and Greek to the Latin forms.
The common opinion, said the lecturer, that the Phœnicians invented the alphabet, is entirely unfounded ”

“ The only consonant-symbols that require special notice are the following:—
All the systems of phonetic notation hitherto considered are based on the Roman alphabet. But although the Roman alphabet has many advantages from a practical point of view, it is evidently impossible to build up a consistent and systematic notation on such an inadequate foundation of arbitrary signs. What is wanted, for scientific purposes especially, is a notation independent of the Roman alphabet, built up systematically—an alphabet in which there is a definite relation between sound and symbol. ”

“ And the majority of examples show a debased type of Letters—often so unlike their originals, and so like one another, as to be scarcely readable. For the sake of readableness the stems should be made longer (fig. 128) . The more slender “Roman” type of initial, commonly used in Italy (Plate XVIII.) , is in every way a more legible letter. The Roman Alphabet still remains the finest [p211] model, and it is better that fine lettering should be almost too slender and delicate, than that it should be at all heavy or clumsy. ”

“ Then anyone who knows the language can put the word back into its own letters. He who does not will be puzzled as to how it should be pronounced; but this is the case always when we do not know the language in question. Now, the first principle of exact transliteration is to use one Roman letter for one letter of the original alphabet. The reason of this is plain. In English we use combinations of letters to represent one sound, such as sh, th, ph. In Semitic languages (and Coptic and Armenian) these sounds have each one letter. ”

“ The Romans never used the successive letters of their alphabet for numeral purposes in the manner practiced by the Syrians, Hebrews, and Greeks, although (as we shall see) an alphabet system was at one time proposed by a late Roman writer. Before the ascendancy of Rome the Etruscans, who inhabited the country nearly corresponding to modern Tuscany and who ruled in Rome until about 500 B.C., used numeral signs which resembled letters of their alphabet and also resembled the numeral signs used by the Romans. ”

“ Every one who writes a letter, owes his alphabet to the Romans and Greeks; the Greeks owed their alphabet to the Phoenicians, and the Phoenicians learnt it in Egypt. It may be a very imperfect alphabet as all the students of phonetics will tell you ”

“ The discovery of the alphabet is at once the triumph, the instrument and the register of the progress of our race. The oldest abecedarium in existence is a child's alphabet on a little ink-bottle of black ware found on the site of Cere, one of the oldest of the Greek settlements in Central Italy, certainly older than the end of the sixth century B. C. The Phœnician alphabet has been reconstructed from several hundred inscriptions. ”

“ Again, the clew given by the Coptic to the sounds of the old Egyptian, was also afforded by the ancient Zend, the sacred language of the Parsees.
Notwithstanding the fact that alphabetic signs were the key to each of these systems of writing, we are not to find that either the hieroglyphic or cuneiform systems were founded on the alphabet. We are to find that alphabetism and a pure alphabet are not identical. We are also to find that before the simplicities of an alphabet are reached; the art of writing in all systems is a series of bewildering complications. ”

“ In taking the Phœnician letters, the Greeks dropped some, used others for slightly different sounds, and added a few to express sounds that were important to them or that did not exist in the Phœnician. But this was done very gradually. It never has been easy to induce people to change and improve their alphabets.
But there is another reason why men have refused to change the order of letters by inserting a new and useful letter in the place where it naturally belonged. The Greeks and many other peoples used the letters of the alphabet for numerals. ”

“ From these names alone, then, even if nothing else were known about the early alphabets, it would be possible to prove the correctness of the Greek legend that they derived their letters from the Phœnicians. A people who themselves invented an alphabet would obviously name the letters with words in their own language, and not with meaningless syllables taken from a foreign speech. ”

“ Further, the alphabets in use are, even the best of them, imperfect. It is plain that, when the members of a particular linguistic community, like, e.g., the Germans or the Portuguese, seek to make their alphabet a consistent picture of the sounds of speech, they aim merely at representing the sounds of their own language. ”

“ The honesty of these writers is unimpeachable, however much their competency may be questioned; and no slight confirmation of their testimony appears, in the judgment of many modern scholars, to be furnished by the correspondence in number, name (the sibilants s and z excepted) , and order, although not in form, between the letters of the Greek and the Semitic alphabets. "In default of further evidence, the very word Alphabet," Canon Taylor remarks, "might suffice to disclose the secret of its origin. ”

“ While speech and mode of writing are distinct and independent, the one of the other, the influence of language structure in the evolution of graphic systems is conspicuous. Thus a sentence of English speech might be expressed by Chinese characters or Egyptian hieroglyphics. In the Tel Armana tablets, more than one language appears in the cuneiform. We have seen how the so called Hittite characters were found on occasion yielding Greek words, and the use of the Roman alphabet for French, German, Italian and other languages, are every day examples. ”

“ It is worth remembering at this point that while our capital letters are strictly Roman, our small or lowercase letters came into being during the middle ages, and many of them would not be recognized by an ancient Roman as having any relation to his alphabet. They therefore belong to the modern world and can be altered without sacrilege. ”

“ They are, however, in one sense, hieroglyphics, being tolerably accurate delineations of men, animals, and instruments. If we are right in our conjectures, the value of the Rosetta stone is incomparably greater than has been imagined. We have no need of hieroglyphics: Roman and Egyptian monuments are full of them. But a primitive alphabet, probably the earliest ever formed in the world, and illustrating an important link in the history of writing,—the adaptation of signs to words,—is certainly a discovery very interesting to any philosophical mind. ”

“ It is clear, for example, that, in the interest of explicitness, we should have a separate symbol for the vowel sound in each of the following syllables: bar, bay, bann, ball, to cite a single illustration.
There is, to be sure, a seemingly valid reason for not extending our alphabet, in the fact that in multiplying syllables it would be difficult to select characters at once easy to make and unambiguous. Moreover, the conservatives might point out, with telling effect, that the present alphabet has proved admirably effective for about three thousand years. ”