The Latin script is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world. It is the standard script of the English language and is often referred to simply as "the alphabet" in English. It is a true alphabet which originated in the 7th century BC in Italy and has changed continually over the last 2,500 years. It has roots in the Semitic alphabet and its offshoot alphabets, the Phoenician, Greek, and Etruscan. The phonetic values of some letters changed, some letters were lost and gained, and several writing styles ("hands") developed. Two such styles, the minuscule and majuscule hands, were combined into one script with alternate forms for the lower and upper case letters. Modern uppercase letters differ only slightly from their classical counterparts, and there are few regional variants.

Summary of evolution The Latin alphabet started out as uppercase serifed letters known as Roman square capitals. The lowercase letters evolved through cursive styles that developed to adapt the inscribed alphabet to being written with a pen. Over the ages many dissimilar stylistic forms of each letter evolved but, when not becoming a recognised subform to transliterate exotic tongues, denoted the same letter. After the evolution from the Western Greek Alphabet through Old Italic alphabet, G developed from C, the consonantal I (namely J) from a flourished I, V and U split likewise and the Germanic-centred ligature of VV became W, the letter thorn Þ was introduced from the runic alphabet but was lost in all except Icelandic, and s would be normally written as a long s (ſ), and when coming before z, it formed the ligature ß, which has survived in German to this day as a separate letter. S would settle as it appears today a terminal s (as it always had been at a word's end) after the 7th century AD – the internal forms were widely deprecated by the 19th century.

However, thanks to classical revival, Roman capitals were reintroduced by humanists making old Latin inscriptions easily legible while many medieval manuscripts are unreadable to an untrained modern reader, due to unfamiliar letterforms, narrow spacing and abbreviation marks save for the apostrophe and Carolingian minuscule letters (lower caps).

The phonetic value of some letters has changed in live languages whether or not from Latin origins, each seeing diverse softenings, drifts or phonetic complications such as in Italian, English, Dutch and French. Vowels have also evolved with notably great vowel shifts in English and Portuguese. Orthography does not fully match phonetics – an illustration being that became used rather than when before i, m, n, v, w for legibility, namely to avoid a succession of vertical strokes, in English.Algeo, J., Butcher, C., The Origins and Development of the English Language, Cengage Learning 2013, p. 128. Within each language there are homophonic heterographs (words written differently but sounding the same) and the adoption of digraphs for new sounds, such as for the voiceless postalveolar fricative in English, being in French, yet in Italian denotes k or the very basic words that began qu and their derivations. A theme for digraphs is widespread use of h as a second letter, avoiding diacritics onto, under, or over the first letter (unavailable in most basic printing presses) as in Romance languages h is usually a voiceless remnant.

Origin

It is generally held that the Latins derived their alphabet from the Etruscan alphabet. The Etruscans, in turn, derived their alphabet from the Greek colony of Cumae in Italy, who used a Western variant of the Greek alphabet, which was in turn derived from the Phoenician alphabet, itself derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs. The Latins ultimately adopted 21 of the original 26 Etruscan letters.

Legendary origin account in Hyginus Gaius Julius Hyginus, who recorded much Roman mythology, mentions in Fab. 277 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 Parcae, Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos invented seven Greek letters – A B H T I Y. Others say that Mercury invented them from the flight of cranes, which, when they fly, form letters. Palamedes, too, son of Nauplius, invented eleven letters; Simonides, too, invented four letters – O E Z PH; Epicharmus of Sicily, two – P and PS. The Greek letters Mercury is said to have brought to Egypt, and from Egypt Cadmus took them to Greece. Cadmus in exile from Arcadia, took them to Italy, and his mother Carmenta changed them to Latin to the number of 15. Apollo on the lyre added the rest.Hyginus, Fabulae

Ultimate derivation from Egyptian hieroglyphs Below is a table synoptically showing selected Proto-Sinaitic signs and the proposed correspondences with Phoenician letters. Also shown are the sound values, names, and descendants of the Phoenician letters.Based on Simons (2011), Figure Two: "Representative selection of proto-Sinaitic characters with comparison to Egyptian hieroglyphs" (p. 38), Figure Three: "Chart of all early proto-Canaanite letters with comparison to proto-Sinaitic signs" (p. 39), Figure Four: "Representative selection of later proto-Canaanite letters with comparison to early proto-Canaanite and proto-Sinaitic signs" (p. 40).

See also: Goldwasser (2010), following Albright (1966), "Schematic Table of Proto-Sinaitic Characters" (fig. 1).

A comparison of glyphs from western ("Proto-Canaanite", Byblos) and southern scripts along with the reconstructed "Linear Ugaritic" (Lundin 1987) is found in Manfried Dietrich and Oswald Loretz, Die Keilalphabete: die phönizisch-kanaanäischen und altarabischen Alphabete in Ugarit, Ugarit-Verlag, 1988, p. 102, reprinted in Wilfred G. E. Watson, Nicolas Wyatt (eds.), Handbook of Ugaritic Studies (1999), p. 86.

+ Possible correspondences between Hieroglyphs, Phoenician and Latin alphabets Hieroglyph Proto-Sinaitic IPA value Reconstructed name Proto-Canaanite Phoenician Archaic Greek Modern Greek (for reference) Etruscan Latin F1 /ʔ/ ʾalp "ox" 𐌀 A O1 /b/ bayt "house" 𐌁B T14 /g/ gaml "throwstick" 𐌂 C G K1K2 /d/ dag "fish" 𐌃 D A28 /h/ haw/hillul "praise" 𐌄 E G43 /w/ waw/uph "fowl" 𐌅 F𐌖U V W Y Z4 /z/ zayn/zayt "sword" 𐌆 Z/ð/ḏiqq "manacle" O6 N24 V28 /ħ/ ḥaṣr "courtyard" 𐌇 H V28/x/ḫayt "thread" D36 /j/ yad "hand" I I J D46 /k/ kap "palm" 𐌊 K U20 /l/ lamd "goad" 𐌋 ϟ L N35 /m/ maym "water" 𐌌 M I10 /n/ naḥaš "snake" 𐌍 N D4 /ʕ/ ʿayn "eye" 𐌏 OV28𓎛 /ɣ/ġabiʿ "calyx" D21 /p/ pʿit "corner" 𐌐 P O34 /kˤ/ or /q/ qoba "needle/nape/monkey" 𐌘 Q D1D19 /r/ raʾš "head" 𐌓 RN6/ʃ/šimš "sun" 𐌔 S M39M40M41 /ɬ/ śadeh "field, land"/θ/ ṯann "bow" 𐌕 T Z9 /t/ tāw "mark" N/A 𐌗 X

Archaic Latin alphabet The original Latin alphabet was: +Original Latin alphabet, in the modern equivalent letters A B C D E F Z H I K L M N O P Q R S T V X

The oldest Latin inscriptions do not distinguish between and , represented both by C, K and Q according to position. This is explained by the fact that the Etruscan language did not make this distinction. K was used before A; Q was used (if at all) before O or V; C was used elsewhere. C derived from Greek Gamma (Γ) and Q from Greek Koppa (Ϙ). In later Latin, K survived only in a few forms such as Kalendae; Q survived only before V (representing ), and C was used everywhere else. G was later invented to distinguish between and ; it was originally simply a C with an additional stroke.

Phonetics

C stood for both and . I stood for both and . V stood for both and .

Old Latin period

K was marginalized in favour of C, which afterward stood for both /ɡ/ and /k/.

Probably during the 3rd century BC, the Z was dropped and a new letter G was placed in its position – according to Plutarch, by Spurius Carvilius Ruga – so that afterward, C = /k/, G = /ɡ/.

Old Latin could be written from right to left (as were Etruscan and early Greek) or boustrophedon, while writing from the middle Republic on was almost always left-to-right.

+ Old Latin alphabet, in the modern equivalent letters A B C D E F G H I K L M N O P Q R S T V X

Classical Latin period

After the conquest of Greece in the 1st century BC, the letters Y and Z were, respectively, adopted and readopted from the Greek alphabet and placed at the end; a later attempt by the emperor Claudius to introduce three additional letters was short-lived. Now the new Latin alphabet contained 23 letters:

+ Classical Latin alphabet Letter A B C D E F G H I K L M N O P Q R S T V X Y Z Latin name (majus) Latin name ā bē cē dē ē ef gē hā ī kā el em en ō pē qū er es tē ū ix zēta Latin pronunciation (IPA)

The Latin names of some of the letters are disputed. In general, however, the Romans did not use the traditional (Semitic-derived) names as in Greek, but adopted the simplified names of the Etruscans, which derived from saying the sounds of the letters: the vowels stood for themselves, the names of the stop consonant letters were formed by adding the neutral vowel e, which in Latin became (except for K and Q, which were distinguished from C by appending the vowel which followed them in Etruscan orthography), and the names of the continuant consonants were formed by preceded the sound with . X was named rather than , as could not begin a word in Latin (and possibly Etruscan). When the letter Y was introduced into Latin, it was probably called hy as in Greek (the name upsilon being not yet in use), but was changed to i Graeca ("Greek i") as Latin speakers had difficulty distinguishing the sounds and . Z was given its Greek name, zeta, when it was borrowed.Sampson, 1990. Writing Systems: A Linguistic Introduction 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 and for the sounds in English see English phonetics.

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 by 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 AD, but it probably existed earlier than that.

Late antiquity

The Latin alphabet spread from Italy, along with the Latin language, to the lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea with the expansion of the Roman Empire. The eastern half of the Roman Empire, including Greece, Asia Minor, the Levant, and Egypt, continued to use Greek as a lingua franca, but Latin was widely spoken in the western half of the Empire, and as the western Romance languages, including French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Catalan, evolved out of Latin they continued to use and adapt the Latin alphabet. In the East, it evolved forming the Romanian language.

Some of the letters had variant shapes in epigraphy: was used occasionally instead of in Roman Gaul. was sometimes used to mark a long . was used in Sub-Roman Britain for the in some grammatical roles.

Middle Ages