ORINGIN OF THE LATIN ALPHABET

The Latin alphabet by the time of Cicero(106-43BC) consisted of 21 letters derived and modified from the Greek alphabet, possibly through direct contact with the Greek colonists at cumae in the Bay of Naples, more probably through the intermediary of the widely trading piratical Etruscans of northern Italy, who had contended with the Greks for maritime supremacy while the Romans were but land-bound farmers in Latium and who had already adopted an alphabet of Greet origin in the seventh century BC. These letters were the consonants B, C, D, F, G, H, K, L, M, N, P, Q, R, S, T, X, the vowels A, E, O, and the letters I and V which stood for the vowel and consonant sounds now differentiated as I and J, U and W. The Greek alphabet of 24 letters included three, the aspirates ¦È (theta), ¦Õ (phi) and ¦Ö (chi), which represented sounds absent from early Latin. Having no phonetic use for them, the Romans converted them into numberals; these ultimately became C(100), M(1,000) and L(50). The Greek ¦Ê (kappa) passed out of use: it persisted only in a few words and then only before A. The Roman conquest of Greece in 146 BC., the bringing of educated Greeks to rome as slaves, the prestige of Greek culture, the later massive Greek settlements in Rome and the consequent need to transliterate Greek words and names into the inadequate Latin alphabet made the Romans add to it the Greek letters ¦Ô (upsilon) and ¦Æ (zeta) as Y and Z and improvise the equivalents TH, PH and CH for the letters ¦È, ¦Õ, ¦Ö which they had earlier discarded. E served for both the Greek ¦Å (epsilon) and ¦Ç (eta); likewise transliterated both the Greek ¦Ï (omicron) and ¦Ø (omega).

THE LETTERS J, U AND W

The letters J, U (as distinct from V) and W did not exist in the Latin alphabet. The letter J as regards its origin ¡®is a comparatively late modification of the letter I. In the ancient Roman alphabet, I, besides its vowel value in ibidem, ilitis, and the kindred consonantal value of modern English Y, as in iactus, iam, Iouem, iustus adiura, maior, peior ¡­ The differentiation was made first in Spanish, where from the very introduction of printing (i.e. in books of 1485-7) we see j used for the consonant and I only for the vowel. For the capitals I had at first to stand for both¡­ but before 1600 a capital J consonant began to appear in Spanish¡¯ (New English Dict. Under J; 1901). U and V were originally interchangeable forms of the one letter which was employed both for a vowel and the consonant. ¡®During the sixteenth century, however, continental printers began to distinguish between u and v, using the former as a vowel and the latter as a consonant. The distinctin if found in Italian printing as early as 1524, but its general introduction dates from 1559-60, when it was employed in the Grammatica of Ramus¡­ In capitals, however, V for some time continued to serve in the old double function¡¯ (New Gngl. Dict. Under U; 1926). The letter W is of medieval origin. ¡®When in the 7th century, the Latin alphabet was first applied to the writing of English, it became necessary to provide a symbol for the sound (w) which dide not exist in contemporary latin. The sound, a gutturally modified bilabial voiced spirant, is acoustically almost identical which the devocalized (u) or (u), which was the sound originally expressed by the Roman U or V as a consonant or symbol, but before the 7th century this Latin sound had developed into (v). The simple u or v could not be used without ambiguity to represent (w)¡­ The ordinary sign for (w) was at first uu¡­ The uu was carried from England to the continent, being used for the sound (w) in the German dialects and in French proper names and other words of Teutonic and Celtic origin. In the 11th century the ligatured form was introduced into England by Norman scribes¡¯ (New Engl. Dict. Under W; 1928). J, I, U and V with the values thus associated with them are commonly used in botanical Latin.

At first the Latin alphabet existed only in the form of capitals (majuscules), admirable indeed for monumental inscriptions on stone such as the Column of Trajan but much less so for rapid script on papyrus and vellum. By the eighth century AD. Alternative small letters (minuscules, ¡®lowercase¡¯ letters) had developed; those known as Caroline minuscules, which are ancestral to those of modern printing, became firmly and widely established in western Europe during the reign of Charlemagne (c.742-841). The sloping letters known as italic, in which botanical names are usually printed, derive from the hand-writing of fifteenth-century Italian scholars and were made popular by the editions of the classics printed in them by Aldus Manutius (1450-1515) and his sons.

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from William T. Stearn's "Botanical Latin"