# The Names of the Latin Letters



## Etruscanus

What are the names of the Latin letters?  I learned Latin using 25 letters, e.g. i / j and u / v.  What would we call 'w'?  (_Ve Anglica_?)

My primary texts are Biblia Sacra and Aeneid, which use 25 letters; however, I understand there currently is a movement to remove v (and j) from texts.


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## Anne345

Look at 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_alphabet


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## Whodunit

The Wikipedia is too long to read through, Anne. I want to summarize the evolution and development of the Latin alphabet as briefly as I can:

The beginnings of the Latin writing system lie in the 7th century BC when it was taken from the Western Greek alphabet and modified to some extent. It consisted of 21 letters: ABCDEFZHIKLMNOPQRSTVX. Under Greek influence, the Romans realized that new letters had to be created. The first enfranchised slave Spuriu Carvilius Ruga invented the letter G (for until then the C was pronounced both like [k] and [g]) for the guttural. He simply wrote a bar across the letter C and it became a G. Furthermore, he abolished the unnecassary Z, because there was no Latin equivalent sound to the Greek [dz].

However, Greek names had to be transliterated now, which resulted in restoring the abolished letter Z and the Y (for the sound [y] in French *u*ne and German gr*ü*n).

The missing letters (to complete it to the 26 modern ones) are W, U, and J. The letter V and I had been semi-vowels [w/j], which apparently confused some people (we are around the 5th/6th century AD), so that they were devided into the full-vowels U and I [ʊ and i] plus V and J [w and j].

The ligature W (V + V) was created because the letter for the [v] sound (as in English *v*ene) was missing. Interestingly enough, some modern languages don't use it except in some rare foreign words (Czech, Italian), while it has its own pronunciation in English, German, or Polish.

There were no diacritics or modifications of letters (except for Æ and Œ in some scripts) in the Ancient Latin writing system. The only peculiarity that stand for Ancient Latin is the all-in-capitals scripts. Lower-case letters were not known yet. However, I can't tell you for sure when the first Latin minuscules were used. I know it for the Greek ones, but not for our Latin ones.

I hope this is understandable and saves you some time instead of reading the whole Wikipedia article.


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## Outsider

Some corrections:



Whodunit said:


> The missing letters (to complete it to the 26 modern ones) are W, U, and J. The letter V and I had been semi-vowels [w/j] or full vowels [u/i] (we are around the 2nd. century BC - 3rd century AD), but with medieval sound changes they came to represent also the consonants [w/v and j/zh/dzh], which apparently confused some people, so that they were devided into the full-vowels U and I [u and i] plus V (the distinction became common in the 18th-19th centuries) and J (the distinction was adopted in the 15th-16th centuries).
> 
> The ligature W (V + V) was created because the letter for the [w] sound (as in English *w*ine) was missing. Interestingly enough, some modern languages don't use it except in some rare foreign words (Czech, Italian), while it has its own pronunciation in German, where the semivowel later changed to [v]. The Polish orthography was influenced by that of German.


 


Whodunit said:


> The only peculiarity that stand for Ancient Latin is the all-in-capitals scripts. Lower-case letters were not known yet. However, I can't tell you for sure when the first Latin minuscules were used.


They were invented in the Carolingian period (9th century).


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## Whodunit

So, why was the W invented, if the letter for [w] (which was apparently V) already existed?


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## Outsider

It's a complicated story. Here's a snapshot:

*Classical period:* I is _ or [j]; V is  or [w];

*Medieval Latin:* I/J is , or [dzh]; V/U is  or * (--> an approximant, like the Spanish intervocalic "b").

But by this time the Latin alphabet had begun to be used for writing other languages, and namely Germanic languages. In the Germanic languages, the semivowel [w] still existed. It had not changed into . I don't know the early history of the German language well, but in English they at first used the letter wynn for [w], which was a borrowed rune. Later (in the Norman period), it was replaced with the ligature (and new letter) W.

German and other languages also adopted W for [w], but in German this semivowel evolved to [v], which is its present value. By influence of German, other languages of Eastern Europe also used W for [v] (Polish, but also Scandinavian languages until the 20th century).

Meanwhile, the J [dzh] and the V  of medieval Latin had evolved into [zh/dzh/x] or [v/b/B] in the Romance languages.

To answer the original question more directly, read the following:




			The Latin names of some of the letters are disputed. In general, however, the Romans did not use the traditional (Semitic-derived) names as in Greek: the names of the stop consonant letters were formed by adding /eː/ to the sound (except for C, K, and Q which needed different vowels to distinguish them) and the names of the continuants consisted either of the bare sound, or the sound preceded by /e/.

Wikipedia

Click to expand...

*_


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## konungursvia

Interesting. How about the punctuation? is that off topic? I heard that started late as well.


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## Outsider

It's probably best to start a new thread for punctuation.


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## Amatus

Etruscanus said:


> What are the names of the Latin letters? I learned Latin using 25 letters, e.g. i / j and u / v. What would we call 'w'? (_Ve Anglica_?)
> 
> My primary texts are Biblia Sacra and Aeneid, which use 25 letters; however, I understand there currently is a movement to remove v (and j) from texts.


 
I have read that the established names for the Latin letters is:

_a be ce de e ef ge ha i ca el em en o pe cu er es te u ex/ix_, with the final vowels long.  Some say that _y _might have been pronounced _hy_ [_hu_], with a Greek vowel sound.  Probably also _i _graeca, once the pronunciation became assimilated to _i._ Compare Italian_ i greca._  I should think that_ w _was called _duplex u._ _z _was probably _zeta_. 

I hope this helps.


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## Etruscanus

Thank you for the great input on the names of the Latin letters.


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