Latin Letters - Spread

Spread

For earlier history, see Latin alphabet.

The Latin alphabet spread, along with the Latin language, from the Italian Peninsula to the lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea with the expansion of the Roman Empire. The eastern half of the Empire, including Greece, Turkey, the Levant, and Egypt, continued to use Greek as a lingua franca, but Latin was widely spoken in the western half, and as the western Romance languages evolved out of Latin, they continued to use and adapt the Latin alphabet.

Read more about this topic:  Latin Letters

Famous quotes containing the word spread:

    Ah, but to play man number one,
    To drive the dagger in his heart,
    To lay his brain upon the board
    And pick the acrid colors out,
    To nail his thought across the door,
    Its wings spread wide to rain and snow,
    To strike his living hi and ho....
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    yet it seems
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    The philanthropist too often surrounds mankind with the remembrance of his own cast- off griefs as an atmosphere, and calls it sympathy. We should impart our courage, and not our despair, our health and ease, and not our disease, and take care that this does not spread by contagion.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)