The Romans acquired and adapted the Greek alphabet creating their 26 character Roman alphabet that notated the phonemes of Latin.
As the Roman Empire grew, different countries adapted the alphabet to record their native languages. Changes had to be made by the different nations to capture the vast range of varying sounds that each language has. New symbols had to be made such as circumflex or accute accents.
Bill Bryson in his book 'Mother Tongue' stresses how important the different accents on letters is to pronunciation.
"David Crystal in 'The English language' notes that, in fact 84% of English spellings conform to a consistent pattern"
"If writing is the physical notation of language, then type is its mechanical notation"
In Europe the invention of type is credited to Johann Gutenberg although there is evidence of a pre existing movable metal type in korea that would have been used as far back as 1241.
Alphabet system's traceable origins went back some 3000 years.
Phil Baines and Andrew Haslam also lay out what they believe to be the two main factors of the story of the western alphabet prior to Gutenberg inventing type, both of which were developed in parallel.
- The first is the establishment of the 26 symbols that including vowel and consonants that represent the phonemes of most European languages.
- The second is the continual refinement of those symbols to end up with the legacy of 26 letters in both Upper and lower case. The idea of a small gap between words and a left to right reading direction were also important developments in the lead up to Gutenberg's type.
The latin alphabet dates from imperial Roman times, although its origins are much earlier:
The Phoenicians, who were a great trading nation from what is now Israel, the Lebanon and Syria used a 22 letter alphabet. Although little Phoenician literature was found by archeologists the earliest recognizable Phoenician inscriptions were found at Byblos and have been dated back to 1100BC
The classical Greek alphabet which is sometime referred to as the Ionic or Eastern alphabet was developed from the Phoenician alphabet.
In 403BC it became the official alphabet in Athens. The Greeks however did make some changes. they used two of the symbols as vowels and created 3 more vowels making 25 letters in all.
Greeks used Phoenician names for letters but they amended the spelling in order to reflect their own pronunciation.
Before the official adoption of the Classical Greek alphabet the Greek colonists had taken a script to Italy. This 'Euboean' alphabet became the Etruscan alphabet and was slightlydifferent from the Classical Greek version.
The Etruscans adapted the alphabet to reflect their phonetics, a process that required the use of 26 letters.
In due course The Romans developed an alphabet based on the Etruscans. They used 21 of the original 26 letters:
- 13 stayed the same - a,b,e,h,i,k,m,n,o,t,x,y,z
- 8 were amended - c,d,g,l,p,r,s,v
- 2 further were reinstated - f and q- had existed in early Greek but had been dropped in Classical Greek.
The alphabet now had 23 letters - with this new alphabet the Romans were able to write a phonetic representation of their language which is now know as latin.
j,u, and w were more recent additives needed to represent other sounds in new languages such as Old English. prior to there introduction i was used to represent i and j, v was used to represent the sounds of both v and u and w wasn't needed until New English came about.
Although the Roman alphabet took many forms, Capitalis Quadrata (which was square capitals) have had the most influence on lettering and the development of typography.
Many of these different versions exist on prescriptions Eg those from the reign of Trajan which can be seen most famously on Trajan's Column in Rome from c114AD.
This is the process of which has led us to our 26 letter alphabet that we use today.
Below are some images which show the development of todays alphabet, you can see the letters get closer and closer to what we use today:
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| Phoenician alphabet |
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| Greek alphabet |
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| Roman alphabet |
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