The basic modern Latin alphabet 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 consists of the following 26 letters.

Majuscule Forms Capital letters or majuscules [IPA pronunciation: /məˈdʒʌskjuls, ˈmædʒəˌskjuls/], in the Roman alphabet A, B, C, D, etc., may also be called capitals, or caps. Upper case, upper-case, or uppercase is also often used in this context as synonym of capital. Manual typesetters kept them in the upper drawers of a desk or in the upper type case, (also called uppercase or capital letters)
A The letter A is the first letter in the Latin alphabet, a vowel. Its name in English ( / B B is the second letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English ( / C ‹C› comes from the same letter as ‹g›. The Semites named it gimel. The sign is possibly adapted from an Egyptian hieroglyph for a staff sling, which may have been the meaning of the name gimel. Another possibility is that it depicted a camel, the Semitic name for which was gamal D The Semitic letter Dâlet probably developed from the logogram for a fish or a door. There are various Egyptian hieroglyphs that might have inspired this. In Semitic, Ancient Greek, and Latin, the letter represented /d/; in the Etruscan alphabet the letter was superfluous but still retained . The equivalent Greek letter is Delta, ‹Δ›.[ E ‹E› differs little from its derived source, the Greek letter epsilon ‹Ε›. In etymology, the Semitic hê probably first represented a praying or calling human figure , and was probably based on a similar Egyptian hieroglyph that indicated a different pronunciation. In Semitic, the letter represented /h/ (and /e/ in foreign words), in Greek F The origin of ‹f› is the Semitic letter vâv that represented the /v/, and originally probably represented either a hook or a club. It may have been based on a comparable Egyptian hieroglyph, such as that for the word mace: G ‹G› is the seventh letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English ( / H The Semitic letter ‹ח› most likely represented the voiceless pharyngeal fricative (ħ). The form of the letter probably stood for a fence or posts. The early Greek eta ‹Η› represented /h/, but later on it came to represent a long vowel, /ɛː/. In Modern Greek, this phoneme has merged with /i/, similar to the English development where I In Semitic, the letter was probably originally a pictogram for an arm with hand, derived from a similar hieroglyph that represented a voiced pharyngeal fricative in Egyptian, but was reassigned to /j/ (as in English "yes") by Semites, because their word for "arm" began with that sound. This letter could also be used to J J originated as a swash character to end some Roman numerals in place of i. There was an emerging distinctive use in Middle High German. Gian Giorgio Trissino was the first to explicitly distinguish I and J as representing separate sounds, in his Ɛpistola del Trissino de le lettere nuωvamente aggiunte ne la lingua italiana ("Trissino's K The letter K comes from the Greek letter K , which was taken from the Semitic kap, the symbol for an open hand. This in turn was likely adapted by Semites who had lived in Egypt from the hieroglyph for "hand" representing D in the Egyptian word for hand, d-r-t. The Semites evidently assigned it the sound value /k/ instead, because their L In English, L can have several values, depending on whether it occurs before or after a vowel. The alveolar lateral approximant occurs before a vowel, as in lip or please, while the velarized alveolar lateral approximant (IPA [ɫ]) occurs in bell and milk (see Dark L). This velarization does not occur in many European languages that use L; it is M M is the thirteenth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English ( / N One of the most common snake hieroglyph was used in Egyptian writing to stand for a sound like English "J", because the Egyptian word for "snake" was djet. It is speculated that Semitic people working in Egypt adapted hieroglyphics to create the first alphabet, and that they used the same snake symbol to represent N, because O The letter was derived from the Semitic `Ayin , which represented a consonant, probably the voiced pharyngeal fricative (IPA: [ʕ]), the sound represented by the Arabic letter ع called `Ayn. This Semitic letter in its original form seems to have been inspired by a similar Egyptian hieroglyph for "eye". The Greeks are thought to have P The Semitic Pê , as well as the Greek Π or π (Pi), and the Etruscan and Latin letters that developed from the former alphabet, all symbolized /p/, a voiceless bilabial plosive Q The Semitic sound value of Qôp was /q/ (voiceless uvular plosive), a sound common to Semitic languages, but not found in English or most Indo-European ones. In Greek, this sign as Qoppa Ϙ probably came to represent several labialized velar plosives, among them /kʷ/ and /kʷʰ/. As a result of later sound shifts, these sounds in Greek changed to R The original semitic letter was probably inspired an Egyptian hieroglyph for "head", pronounced t-p in Egyptian, but it was used for /r/ by Semites because in their language, the word for "head" was Rêš . It developed into Greek Ρ ῥῶ (Rhô) and Latin R. It is likely that some Etruscan and Western Greek forms of the S Semitic Šîn represented a voiceless postalveolar fricative /ʃ/ (as in ship). Greek did not have this sound, so the Greek sigma (Σ) came to represent /s/. In Etruscan and Latin, the /s/ value was maintained, and only in modern languages has the letter been used to represent other sounds T Taw was the last letter of the Western Semitic and Hebrew alphabets, and probably represented a cross. The sound value of Semitic Taw, Greek alphabet Tαυ , Old Italic and Latin T has remained fairly constant, representing [t] in each of these; and it has also kept its original basic shape in all of these alphabets U The letter U ultimately comes from the Semitic letter Waw by way of the letter Y. See the letter Y for details V V is the twenty-second letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English ( / W X Apart from being a part of the Latin alphabet, X has been used as a name sake for a Generation of Humans. Generation X commonly abbreviated to Gen X, is the Generation born after the Baby Boom ended, ranging from 1961 to 1981. "X" the letter is a Roman numeral representing 10. In mathematics it is commonly used as the name for an Y The ancestor of Y was the Semitic letter waw, from which also come F, U, V, and W. See F for details Z The name of the Semitic symbol was zayin, possibly meaning "weapon", and was the seventh letter. It represented either z as in English and French, or possibly more like /dz/
Minuscule Forms Lower case , minuscule, or small letters are the smaller form of letters, as opposed to upper case or capital letters, as used in European alphabets (Greek, Latin, Cyrillic, and Armenian). For example, the letter "a" is lower case while the letter "A" is upper case (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

They are the 26 letters that occur in the ISO The International Organization for Standardization , widely known as ISO, is an international-standard-setting body composed of representatives from various national standards organizations. Founded on 23 February 1947, the organization promulgates worldwide proprietary industrial and commercial standards. It has its headquarters in Geneva, standard ISO/IEC 646 ISO/IEC 646:1991, Information technology — ISO 7-bit coded character set for information interchange, is an ISO standard that since its first edition in 1972 has specified a 7-bit character code from which several national standards are derived, also known as ECMA-6.

Alphabets that are equivalent in the sense that they consist of the same 26 letters – possibly also used in combination with diacritics A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign) is an ancillary glyph added to a letter, or basic glyph. The term derives from the Greek διακριτικός (diakritikós, "distinguishing"). Diacritic is both an adjective and a noun, whereas diacritical is only an adjective. Some diacritical marks, such as the, provided that letters thereby modified are not considered distinct letters of the alphabet:

English is unique among major modern European languages in requiring no diacritics for native words (although a diaeresis An umlaut is the orthographical representation of a type of sound shift in spoken language. A very similar diacritical mark (called diaeresis or "trema") is used to signify a linguistic hiatus. In modern computer systems (using Unicode), umlaut and diaeresis are represented identically: ä represents both a-umlaut and a-trema is used by some writers in words such as "coöperation", of which The New Yorker The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry published by Condé Nast Publications. Starting as a weekly in the mid-1920s, the magazine is now published forty-seven times per year, with five of these issues covering two-week spans offers an example[1]).

  1. This alphabet uses diacritics

See also

References

  1. ^ "site:newyorker.com coöperation - Google Search". http://www.google.com/search?q=site:newyorker.com+coöperation. Retrieved 2009-12-02.
The basic modern Latin alphabet
Aa The letter A is the first letter in the Latin alphabet, a vowel. Its name in English ( / Bb B is the second letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English ( / Cc ‹C› comes from the same letter as ‹g›. The Semites named it gimel. The sign is possibly adapted from an Egyptian hieroglyph for a staff sling, which may have been the meaning of the name gimel. Another possibility is that it depicted a camel, the Semitic name for which was gamal Dd The Semitic letter Dâlet probably developed from the logogram for a fish or a door. There are various Egyptian hieroglyphs that might have inspired this. In Semitic, Ancient Greek, and Latin, the letter represented /d/; in the Etruscan alphabet the letter was superfluous but still retained . The equivalent Greek letter is Delta, ‹Δ›.[ Ee ‹E› differs little from its derived source, the Greek letter epsilon ‹Ε›. In etymology, the Semitic hê probably first represented a praying or calling human figure , and was probably based on a similar Egyptian hieroglyph that indicated a different pronunciation. In Semitic, the letter represented /h/ (and /e/ in foreign words), in Greek Ff The origin of ‹f› is the Semitic letter vâv that represented the /v/, and originally probably represented either a hook or a club. It may have been based on a comparable Egyptian hieroglyph, such as that for the word mace: Gg ‹G› is the seventh letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English ( / Hh The Semitic letter ‹ח› most likely represented the voiceless pharyngeal fricative (ħ). The form of the letter probably stood for a fence or posts. The early Greek eta ‹Η› represented /h/, but later on it came to represent a long vowel, /ɛː/. In Modern Greek, this phoneme has merged with /i/, similar to the English development where Ii In Semitic, the letter was probably originally a pictogram for an arm with hand, derived from a similar hieroglyph that represented a voiced pharyngeal fricative in Egyptian, but was reassigned to /j/ (as in English "yes") by Semites, because their word for "arm" began with that sound. This letter could also be used to 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

Categories: Latin-derived alphabets

 

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Sat, 05 May 2007 19:19:00 GM

in 1928, the turkish dictator kemal atatuerk decreed that turkish should be spelt with a modified . latin alphabet. instead of the arabic. he gave the turks only eight months for the change, which drove most publishers bankrupt. ...

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