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Latin script: the story on HearLore | HearLore
Latin script
The Latin script began not in Rome, but in the ancient Greek city of Cumae, where a form of the Greek alphabet was altered by the Etruscans before the Ancient Romans ever adopted it. This chain of adaptation created a writing system that would eventually become the most widely used in human history, serving as the foundation for the International Phonetic Alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet. The script's journey from the Mediterranean to the global stage was driven by the expansion of the Roman Empire, which carried the letters from the Italian Peninsula to lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea. While the eastern half of the Empire, including Greece, Turkey, the Levant, and Egypt, continued to use Greek as a lingua franca, Latin was widely spoken in the western half. As the western Romance languages evolved out of Latin, they continued to use and adapt the Latin alphabet, ensuring its survival long after the political power of Rome had faded.
Evolution of Letters
The letters I and V proved inconvenient when the Latin alphabet was adapted to Germanic and Romance languages, leading to centuries of erratic conventions before standardization. The letter W originated as a doubled V, written as VV, used to represent the sound found in Old English as early as the 7th century. It came into common use in the later 11th century, replacing the letter wynn, which had been used for the same sound. In the Romance languages, the minuscule form of V was a rounded u, from which was derived a rounded capital U for the vowel in the 16th century, while a new, pointed minuscule v was derived from V for the consonant. The letter J, originally a swash form of I used for word-final consonants, was introduced into English for the consonant in the 17th century but was not universally considered a distinct letter in the alphabetic order until the 19th century. These changes were not merely aesthetic but were essential for representing the phonetic realities of languages that had diverged significantly from classical Latin.
Global Expansion
As late as 1500, the Latin script was limited primarily to the languages spoken in Western, Northern, and Central Europe, with the Orthodox Christian Slavs of Eastern and South-eastern Europe mostly using Cyrillic and the Greek alphabet in use by Greek speakers around the eastern Mediterranean. Through European colonization, the Latin script spread to the Americas, Oceania, parts of Asia, Africa, and the Pacific, in forms based on the Spanish, Portuguese, English, French, German, and Dutch alphabets. It is used for many Austronesian languages, including the languages of the Philippines and the Malaysian and Indonesian languages, replacing earlier Arabic and indigenous Brahmic alphabets. Under Portuguese missionary influence, a Latin alphabet was devised for the Vietnamese language, which had previously used Chinese characters. Portuguese and other European missionaries, who arrived in Goa on the west coast of India in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, introduced Roman script for the Konkani language, an Indo-Aryan language. The Latin-based alphabet replaced the Chinese characters in administration in the 19th century with French rule.
Where did the Latin script begin before the Romans adopted it?
The Latin script began in the ancient Greek city of Cumae, where a form of the Greek alphabet was altered by the Etruscans before the Ancient Romans ever adopted it. This chain of adaptation created a writing system that would eventually become the most widely used in human history.
When was the letter W introduced into common use in the Latin script?
The letter W came into common use in the later 11th century, replacing the letter wynn which had been used for the same sound. It originated as a doubled V written as VV to represent the sound found in Old English as early as the 7th century.
Which countries adopted the Latin alphabet after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991?
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, three of the newly independent Turkic-speaking republics, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, as well as Romanian-speaking Moldova, officially adopted Latin alphabets for their languages. Kyrgyzstan, Iranian-speaking Tajikistan, and the breakaway region of Transnistria kept the Cyrillic alphabet due to their close ties with Russia.
When did the People's Republic of China introduce a Latin script for the Zhuang language?
In 1957, the People's Republic of China introduced a script reform to the Zhuang language, changing its orthography from Sawndip to a Latin script alphabet. In 1982, this was further standardized to use only Latin script letters.
How many people use the Latin alphabet as of July 2020?
In July 2020, 2.6 billion people, representing 36% of the world population, use the Latin alphabet. This figure serves as a testament to the success of digital standards like ISO/IEC 646 and ASCII.
When did the government of Uzbekistan announce the finalization of the transition from Cyrillic to Latin?
On the 12th of February 2021, the government of Uzbekistan announced it will finalize the transition from Cyrillic to Latin for the Uzbek language by 2023. Plans to switch to Latin originally began in 1993 but subsequently stalled.
In 1928, as part of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's reforms, the new Republic of Turkey adopted a Latin alphabet for the Turkish language, replacing a modified Arabic alphabet. Most of the Turkic-speaking peoples of the former USSR, including Tatars, Bashkirs, Azeri, Kazakh, and Kyrgyz, had their writing systems replaced by the Latin-based Uniform Turkic alphabet in the 1930s, but in the 1940s, all were replaced by Cyrillic. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, three of the newly independent Turkic-speaking republics, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, as well as Romanian-speaking Moldova, officially adopted Latin alphabets for their languages. Kyrgyzstan, Iranian-speaking Tajikistan, and the breakaway region of Transnistria kept the Cyrillic alphabet, chiefly due to their close ties with Russia. In the 1930s and 1940s, the majority of Kurds replaced the Arabic script with two Latin alphabets, and although only the official Kurdish government uses an Arabic alphabet for public documents, the Latin Kurdish alphabet remains widely used throughout the region by the majority of Kurdish-speakers.
Modern Adaptations
In 1957, the People's Republic of China introduced a script reform to the Zhuang language, changing its orthography from Sawndip, a writing system based on Chinese, to a Latin script alphabet that used a mixture of Latin, Cyrillic, and IPA letters to represent both the phonemes and tones of the Zhuang language, without the use of diacritics. In 1982, this was further standardized to use only Latin script letters. With the collapse of the Derg and subsequent end of decades of Amharic assimilation in 1991, various ethnic groups in Ethiopia dropped the Ge'ez script, which was deemed unsuitable for languages outside of the Semitic branch. In the following years, the Kafa, Oromo, Sidama, Somali, and Wolaitta languages switched to Latin while there is continued debate on whether to follow suit for the Hadiyya and Kambaata languages. On the 15th of September 1999, the authorities of Tatarstan, Russia, passed a law to make the Latin script a co-official writing system alongside Cyrillic for the Tatar language by 2011, but a year later, the Russian government overruled the law and banned Latinization on its territory.
Digital Standardization
By the 1960s, it became apparent to the computer and telecommunications industries in the First World that a non-proprietary method of encoding characters was needed. The International Organization for Standardization encapsulated the Latin alphabet in their ISO/IEC 646 standard. To achieve widespread acceptance, this encapsulation was based on popular usage. As the United States held a preeminent position in both industries during the 1960s, the standard was based on the already published American Standard Code for Information Interchange, better known as ASCII, which included in the character set the 26 times 2 uppercase and lowercase letters of the English alphabet. Later standards issued by the ISO, for example ISO/IEC 10646, have continued to define the 26 times 2 letters of the English alphabet as the basic Latin alphabet with extensions to handle other letters in other languages. In July 2020, 2.6 billion people, representing 36% of the world population, use the Latin alphabet, a testament to the success of these digital standards.
Technical Nuances
Some modified letters, such as the symbols with acute accents, may be regarded as new individual letters in themselves, and assigned a specific place in the alphabet for collation purposes, separate from that of the letter on which they are based, as is done in Swedish. In other cases, such as with German characters, this is not done, with letter-diacritic combinations being identified with their base letter. The same applies to digraphs and trigraphs. Different diacritics may be treated differently in collation within a single language. For example, in Spanish, the character is considered a letter, and sorted between C and D in dictionaries, but the accented vowels are not separated from the unaccented vowels. English is the only major modern European language that requires no diacritics for its native vocabulary, though historically, in formal writing, a diaeresis was sometimes used to indicate the start of a new syllable within a sequence of letters that could otherwise be misinterpreted as being a single vowel. Modern writing styles either omit such marks or use a hyphen to indicate a syllable break.
Future Transitions
In 2015, the government of Kazakhstan announced that a Kazakh Latin alphabet would replace the Kazakh Cyrillic alphabet as the official writing system for the Kazakh language by 2025. There are also talks about switching from the Cyrillic script to Latin in Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, and Mongolia, though Mongolia has since opted to revive the Mongolian script instead of switching to Latin. In October 2019, Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, the national organization for Inuit in Canada, announced that they will introduce a unified writing system for the Inuit languages in the country, based on the Latin alphabet and modeled after the one used in the Greenlandic language. On the 12th of February 2021, the government of Uzbekistan announced it will finalize the transition from Cyrillic to Latin for the Uzbek language by 2023, with plans to switch to Latin originally beginning in 1993 but subsequently stalling. At present, the Crimean Tatar language uses both Cyrillic and Latin, and after Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014, the Latin script was dropped entirely, though Crimean Tatars outside of Crimea continue to use Latin and on the 22nd of October 2021, the government of Ukraine approved a proposal endorsed by the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People to switch the Crimean Tatar language to Latin by 2025.