History of The Latin Alphabet - Summary of Evolution

Summary of Evolution

The Latin alphabet started out as roman square capitals, uppercase serifed letters. Through cursive styles that developed to adapt the formerly inscribed alphabet to writing with a pen, the lowercase letters evolved. Throughout the ages, many dissimilar stylistic variations of each letter have evolved that are still identified as being the same letter.

In the course of the evolution of the alphabet from the old italic alphabet, G and Q developed from C, from the Greek alphabet the letters K,X,Y,Z were taken, the letter j developed from a flourished i, v and u split and the ligature of vv became w, the letter thorn þ was introduced from the runic alphabet but was lost in all languages bar Icelandic, additionally the letter s after the 7th century could be written either as a long s (ſ) inside a word or as a terminal s at the end or after a long s (ß), but the long s was later lost.

However, thanks to classical revival, Roman capitals were reintroduced by humanists making Latin inscriptions easily legible to modern readers while many medieval manuscripts are unreadable to an untrained modern reader, due to unfamiliar letterforms, narrow spacing and abbreviation marks with some exceptions of some marks such as the apostrophe and the exception of Carolingian minuscule letters (lower caps) which were mistaken for Roman.

Additionally the phonetic value of the letters has changed from its origins and is not constant across the languages adopting the latin alphabet, such as English or French, often the orthography does not fully match the phonetics, resulting in Homophonic heterographs (words written differently but sounding the same) such as in English and adopting digraphs for new sounds, such as sh for Voiceless postalveolar fricative in English.