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The Latin alphabet, also known as the Roman alphabet, is the collection of letters originally used by the Ancient Rome to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered except several letters splitting—i.e. from , and from —additions such as , and extensions such as letters with , it forms the Latin script that is used to write most languages of modern Europe, Africa, the Americas, and Oceania. Its basic modern inventory is standardized as the ISO basic Latin alphabet.
| + Old Italic alphabet |
| +Archaic Latin alphabet |
| + Old Latin alphabet |
| + Classical Latin alphabet |
The Latin names of some of these letters are disputed; for example, may have been called or . In general the Romans did not use the traditional (Semitic-derived) names as in Greek: the names of the plosives were formed by adding to their sound (except for and , which needed different vowels to be distinguished from ) and the names of the consisted as a rule either of the bare sound, or the sound preceded by .
The letter when introduced was probably called "hy" as in Greek, the name upsilon not being in use yet, but this was changed to i Graeca ("Greek i") as Latin speakers had difficulty distinguishing its foreign sound from . was given its Greek name, zeta. This scheme has continued to be used by most modern European languages that have adopted the Latin alphabet. For the Latin sounds represented by the various letters see Latin spelling and pronunciation; for the names of the letters in English see English alphabet.
diacritic mark were not regularly used, but they did occur sometimes, the most common being the apex used to mark , which had previously sometimes been written doubled. However, in place of taking an apex, the letter i was written long i: . For example, what is today transcribed Lūciī a fīliī was written in the inscription depicted. Some letters have more than one form in epigraphy. Latinists have treated some of them especially such as , a variant of found in Roman Gaul. The primary mark of punctuation was the interpunct, which was used as a word divider, though it fell out of use after 200 AD.
Old Roman cursive script, also called majuscule cursive and capitalis cursive, was the everyday form of handwriting used for writing letters, by merchants writing business accounts, by schoolchildren learning the Latin alphabet, and even emperors issuing commands. A more formal style of writing was based on Roman square capitals, but cursive was used for quicker, informal writing. It was most commonly used from about the 1st century BC to the 3rd century, but it probably existed earlier than that. It led to Uncial script, a majuscule script commonly used from the 3rd to 8th centuries AD by Latin and Greek scribes. Tironian notes were a shorthand system consisting of thousands of signs.
New Roman cursive script, also known as lower case cursive, was in use from the 3rd century to the 7th century, and uses letter forms that are more recognizable to modern eyes; , , , and had taken a more familiar shape, and the other letters were proportionate to each other. This script evolved into a variety of regional medieval scripts (for example, the Merovingian, Visigothic and Benevantan scripts), to be later supplanted by the Carolingian minuscule.
With the fragmentation of political power, the Palaeography changed and varied greatly throughout the Middle Ages, even after the invention of the printing press. Early deviations from the classical forms were the uncial script, a development of the Old Roman cursive, and various so-called minuscule scripts that developed from New Roman cursive, of which the insular script developed by Irish Intellectual and derivations of this, such as Carolingian minuscule were the most influential, introducing the lower case forms of the letters, as well as other writing conventions that have since become standard.
The languages that use the Latin script generally use capital letters to begin paragraphs and sentences and proper nouns. The rules for capitalization have changed over time, and different languages have varied in their rules for capitalization. Old English, for example, was rarely written with even proper nouns capitalized, whereas Modern English writers and printers of the 17th and 18th century frequently capitalized most and sometimes all nouns; for example, from the preamble of the United States Constitution:
This is still systematically done in modern German language.
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