Roman Writing

       The usual date of the founding of Rome is undoubtedly correct or nearly so. It was about the middle of the eighth century B.C., and the rapid enlargement of the new Latin town on the Tiber, produced by the influx of settlers into a trade emporium with waterway, must have led to an early use of writing. This indicates something like 700 B.C. for the period of the extension of that art over the whole of Italy. The custom of writing from right to left and left to right in alternate lines was retained for several centuries among the various Italic peoples, but the Latins seem to have been the first to adopt the Greek modification by which the letters took their permanent shape from the left-right sequence. In several Greek towns, the old T was replaced by a C (the result of a cursive mode of writing), and the triangular A had its second and third lines represented by a single curve. The IT was still a P, and the P had a little stroke added to it (P) for the sake of distinction. The Sigma was commonly written ^ instead of (2). The Latins omitted of course such letters as they found superfluous (z, th, k, ph, ch, ps, and oo), but were naturally bound to retain letters already becoming superfluous to the Greeks (F, Q). The third letter of the alphabet was used for both K and G ; but later, when the need of some differentiation became felt, the useless Z was replaced by a second C to which a tail was added ( Q). The Eta (or Heta) was made to retain its earliest function as a strong breathing (H), although the Greeks were treating it as no more than EE. The Greek confusion between the symbols for ks, ps, and c/i, affected the Latins so far that one of the three letters, i.e. X, was taken to represent the only sound of the three which their language needed, namely ks ; and this being an afterthought, it was put at the end of the alphabet. Thus in the second century B.C. the Romans had their alphabet completely formed in the capital shapes, and with the phonetic values, which it thenceforward retained. The letters were A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, L, M, N, 0, P, Q, R, S, T, V, X, the F being sounded probably as our V and F, the V as our U and W. It was long afterwards that the F was restricted to the sound of English F, and V as a consonant took the sound of English Y (instead of W.) The Q was a more guttural letter than the C originally, but afterwards lost its distinctiveness of utterance. When it became fashionable to learn and quote Greek, in the time of Cicero and after, the letters K, Y, and Z were reinserted in the Latin alphabet for form's sake, as K, Y, Z. It was not till the sixteenth century that, in the northern countries of Europe, the letter J was evolved from the black letter form of I (|) arid the letter V split into U and V. As for the W, it was needed only by Germanic people, and was consequently a late intruder into the modern Roman alphabet.

Index 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, You Are Reading Chapter 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34 chapters