History of the Latin script

Two such styles, the minuscule and majuscule hands, were combined into one script with alternate forms for the lower and upper case letters.

The lowercase letters evolved through cursive styles that developed to adapt the inscribed alphabet to being written with a pen.

However, thanks to classical revival, Roman capitals were reintroduced by humanists making old Latin inscriptions easily legible while many medieval manuscripts are unreadable to an untrained modern reader, due to unfamiliar letterforms, narrow spacing and abbreviation marks save for the apostrophe and Carolingian minuscule letters (lower caps).

Orthography does not fully match phonetics – an illustration being that ⟨o⟩ became used rather than ⟨u⟩ when before i, m, n, v, w for legibility, namely to avoid a succession of vertical strokes, in English.

Old Latin could be written from right to left (as were Etruscan and early Greek) or boustrophedon, while writing after the first century BC was almost always left-to-right.

The languages that use the Latin alphabet generally use capital letters to begin paragraphs and sentences and for proper nouns.

The use of the letters I and V for both consonants and vowels proved inconvenient as the Latin alphabet was adapted to Germanic and Romance languages.

The names of the letters were largely unchanged, with the exception of H. As the sound /h/ disappeared from the Romance languages, the original Latin name hā became difficult to distinguish from A. Emphatic forms such as [aha] and [axxa] were used, developing eventually into acca, the direct ancestor of English aitch.

[8] With the spread of printing, several styles of Latin typography emerged with typefaces based on various minuscules of the Middle Ages depending on the region.

In Italy, due to the revival of classical culture, the heavy gothic styles were soon displaced by Venetian Latin types, also called antiqua, which were based on the inscriptional capitals on Roman buildings and monuments.

However, humanist scholars of the early 15th century mistook Carolingian minuscule as the authentic writing style of the Romans and redesigned the small Carolingian letter, lengthening ascenders and descenders, and adding incised serifs and finishing strokes to integrate them with the Roman capitals.

Early italic hand, dating from the 15th century, was based on humanist minuscule with pronounced serifs, a single story a, open tailed g, slight forward slope and in the late renaissance could have been written with flourishes and swashes.

The main examples were the Italian hand and the English round-hand, which in Britain were taught to men and women respectively, these scripts feature flowing letters which could be written with a single pen lift (with the exception of x and the marks added after writing the word which were dots on i and j and the bar of the ascender of t) with straight or looped ascenders and descenders.

As late as 1492, the Latin alphabet was limited primarily to the languages spoken in western, northern and central Europe.

During colonialism, the alphabet began its spread around the world, being employed for previously unwritten languages, notably in the wake of Christianization, being used in Bible translations.

It spread to the Americas, Australia, and parts of Asia, Africa, and the Pacific, along with the Spanish, Portuguese, English, French, and Dutch languages.

Vietnam, under French rule, adapted the Latin alphabet for Vietnamese, which had previously used Chinese characters.

Most of Turkic-speaking peoples of the former USSR, including Tatars, Bashkirs, Azeri, Kazakh, Kyrgyz and others, used the Uniform Turkic alphabet in the 1930s.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, several of the newly independent Turkic-speaking republics adopted the Latin alphabet, replacing Cyrillic.

Among these, Polish uses a variety of diacritics and digraphs to represent special phonetic values, as well as l with stroke – ł – for a w-like sound.

Croatian and the Latin version of Serbian use carons, or háčeks, in č, š, ž, an acute in ć and a bar in đ.

The Duenos inscription , dated to the 6th century BC, shows the earliest known forms of the Old Latin alphabet .
Two carvings in San Pietro in Vincoli , Rome. The lower dates to the 4th century AD, with letters in a Roman cursive style and no spaces between words.
De chalcographiae inventione (1541, Mainz ) with the 23 letters. W , U and J are missing.
Jeton from Nuremberg , c. 1553, with 24 letters, W is included.
Simplified relationship between various scripts leading to the development of modern lower case of the standard Latin alphabet and that of the modern variants, Fraktur (used in Germany until recently) and Gaelic (Ireland). Several scripts coexisted such as half-uncial and uncial , which derive from Roman cursive and Greek uncial , and Visigothic , Merovingian (Luxeuil variant here) and Beneventan . The Carolingian script was the basis for blackletter and humanist . What is commonly called "Gothic writing" is technically called blackletter (here Textualis quadrata ), and is completely unrelated to Visigothic script. The letter j is i with a flourish ; u and v are the same letter in early scripts and varied according to position in insular half-uncial and caroline minuscule and later scripts; W is a ligature of vv; in Anglo-Saxon insular the rune wynn is used as a w and thorn (þ) for th. A dot was adopted for i only after late-caroline (protogothic), and in Beneventan script the macron abbreviation featured a dot above. Lost variants such as r rotunda , ligatures and scribal abbreviation marks are omitted, long s is shown when no terminal s (surviving variant) is present. Humanist script was the basis for venetian types which changed little until today, such as Times New Roman ( a serif typeface ).
Handwritten form of the Latin script used in Germany
World distribution of the Latin alphabet. The blue areas show the countries where the Latin alphabet is the sole official script or most predominant writing system.