Latin alphabet

The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today.

Extensions

In the course of its history, the Latin alphabet was adapted for use for new languages, some of which had phonemes which were not used in languages previously written with this alphabet, and therefore extensions were created as needed. These take the form of modified symbols by changing the shape or adding diacritics, by joining several letters together as ligatures, or by completely new forms.

Related Topics:
Phonemes - Diacritics - Ligatures

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These new forms are given a place in the alphabet by defining a collating sequence. This is language dependent as shown in the pertinent section below.

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Other letters

In Old English, eth ð and the Runic letters thorn þ, and wynn ƿ were added. Eth and thorn were replaced with 'th', and wynn with the new letter 'w'. In modern Icelandic, thorn and eth are still used. The letters Þþ (thorn), Ðð (eth), and Wynn (wynn) are no longer a part of the Latin alphabet as used in English.

Related Topics:
Old English - Eth - Runic - Thorn - Wynn - Icelandic - Þ - Ð

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For a short time in Roman history, the three Claudian letters were added to the alphabet, but they were not widely received and were eventually removed.

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The African language Hausa uses three additional consonant letters: ɓ, ɗ and ƙ, which are variants of b, d and g employed by linguists to represent certain sounds similar to them.

Related Topics:
Hausa - Consonant

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Ligatures

A ligature is a fusion of two or more ordinary letters into a new glyph. Examples are Æ from AE, ? from OE, ß from ?s, Dutch ? from i and j. The "?s" pair is simply an archaic double s. The first glyph is the archaic medial form, and the second the final form. Note that ? is capitalised as ? (never Ij).

Related Topics:
Ligature - Æ - ? - ß - Dutch

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Diacritics

Diacritics are marks that are added to specific letters to modify their pronunciation. The effect is language dependent.

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• the cedilla in ç, originally a small z written below the c (once symbolized {{IPA|/ts/}} in Romance languages, now gives c a 'soft' sound before a, o, and u, for example, {{IPA|/s/}} in French façade, Portuguese Caçar and in Catalan Barça).
• the caron in ? ? ? (used in Baltic and Slavic languages to mark post-alveolar versions of the base phoneme).
• the tilde in Spanish ñ, Portuguese ã and õ, Estonian õ. In Portuguese, it was originally a small n written above the letter (once used to mark the elision of a former n, now marks nasalization of the base letter). In Estonian, õ is considered a separate letter of the alphabet.
• the acute accent in á é í ó ú in French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and other languages.
• the grave accent in à è ì ò ù in French, Italian, Portuguese and other languages.
• the circumflex in the vowels â ê î ô û in French, Portuguese, Romanian, and other languages, and in the consonants ? ? ? ? ? in Esperanto.
• the umlaut in ä ö ü in German and other languages, and ë in Albanian, which changes the quality (sound) of the vowel. In German, this mark was formerly written as a small e over the affected vowel. Modern German spelling accepts ae oe and ue as variants when the umlaut is unavailable.
• the diaeresis (same visual appearance as the umlaut above) in ä ë ï ö ü in several languages.
• the dot above in ? ? ? in Maltese and ? in Polish and ? in Lithuanian.
• the ogonek in ? ? ? ? in Polish and Lithuanian.
• the macron in ? ? ? ? ? in Latvian, M?ori and romanized Japanese.
• the double acute accent in ? ? in Hungarian, representing long versions of the umlauted vowels ö and ü.
• the breve in ? in Romanian, ? in Turkish and in ? in Esperanto and Belarusian ?acinka.
• the comma underneath, as used in ? and ? in Romanian (often rendered less than optimally in fonts as a cedilla). Also used for ? ? ? ? in Latvian.
• the dotless i (a "negative diacritic") in ? as used in Turkish.

There are other diacritics and other uses for the ones described here. Please see Alphabets derived from the Latin for a more complete list.

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