Rearranging A-Z: put the Roman alphabet in chronological order

Factual Questions
1

I’ve heard – which means that it’s probably incorrect, of course – that O is the oldest letter of the Roman alphabet, and that J or W is the most recent addition.

What, then, would the 26-letter Roman alphabet so popular in English, French, Spanish, German and so many other related languages look like if it were arranged in chronological order, from oldest letter to newest? Would it actually run from O to J, or are those positions subject to change?

Is there even enough information to definitively date each of the 26 letters?

(If it ends up making a difference, I’m curious about the Roman alphabet as used in English. I don’t know if, say, the French adopted their more recent letters on a different schedule. But that would be interesting as well.)

2

O. Oooo oo ooo oooooo “Oooo”, oo oooo.
(Above post written entirely in original Roman)

3

If you wander round the old buildings here you’ll see some with lettered staircases. Some of these miss out ‘J’ which would seem to support the j-is-last theory.

4

I think this would depend a lot on your definition of when a particular letter was created. For example, there are a number of letters in the Phoenician alphabet which are quite recognizable as the ancestors of the corresponding Roman-letter letters (such as E and K), except that they face in the other direction, since Phoenician (like pretty much all written Semitic languages) is/was written right-to-left. (I would assume that it’s in that sense that O is considered the “oldest letter”: its form hasn’t changed at all over time.)

So when would you define the invention of the letter E, for example: when it was originally invented, or when it was flipped around to form the shape that we’re familiar with?

5

The Latin alphabet wasn’t just invented one letter at a time but rather borrowed wholesale from the Etruscans (Rome’s neighbours to the north), about 700-600BC.

Or at least, most of it was.

To cut a long and very interesting story short, the Romans got the alphabet from the Etruscans, who got it from Greek traders and settlers in Italy (about 700BC).

The alphabet borrowed by the Etruscans was a Western Greek variant of the early Greek alphabet, which the Greeks had borrowed and adapted from (almost certainly) the Phoenicians (a great maritime people from modern Lebanon) in 900-800BC.

The Romans borrowed these letters from the Etruscans:
ACEFHIKLMNPQRSTV
and borrowed BDOX either from the Etruscans (who didn’t generally use those letters but had definitely borrowed them from the Greek alphabet) or directly from the Western Greek alphabet.

In the very early Roman alphabet, C had to serve for both of the sounds /k/ and /g/; but by adding a stroke to C, they removed this ambiguity and created a new letter G; K faded largely out of use.

Later, during the Republic, when the influence of classical Greek learning was great and Latin was importing a large number of Greek loanwords, YZ were imported.

Later still, the letter V, which could stand either for an /u/ vowel (as in ‘cool’) or a consonant which was originally pronounced rather like an English ‘w’ but which later changed its pronunciation to /v/, was adapted by doubling to represent /w/ (about 300-500AD).

Finally, U was added to distinguish the vowel /u/ from the consonant /v/, and J (a variant of I, originally with the sound /y/) was added for similar reasons, in the early Middle Ages.

Of course, a wide variety of other letters exist in alphabets descended from the Latin alphabet, but that’s the story of the 26 English ones.

http://www.ancientscripts.com/latin.html
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet

6

Cool! I figured that most of the letters were introduced in clusters – glad to see my suspicions were confirmed.

This thread came about because of another night of pub trivia. This Tuesday, one of the questions was “What was the earliest letter of the English alphabet?” We guessed I, because, well, it’s just a line; the answer given was O. (Which is, I guess, just a circle.) Anyway, I thought at the time that it was a silly question – I knew some letters had been added to the alphabet as late as the Middle Ages, but I figured the bulk of it was inherited from earlier sources.

On the other hand, a couple of websites seem to indicate that O is really, really old – but as you say, it starts to depend on what the question means. The same shape used as a letter for a long time, even if it wasn’t called or pronounced “O”?

At any rate, nice to know.

7

“j” was once a variation of “i”. “w” sort of replaced a letter called “wyn”. I’ve seen old manuscripts where it was written as “uu”.

8

OK, let me rephrase that: there was only one letter between ‘H’ and ‘K’, which looked like ‘|’ :slight_smile: Thanks, I knew it was sort of that, but knew someone would come along and explain it.

9

Try this site, specifically this page. You can observe the evolution of the Latin alphabet (and others from the first link) in .gif image format, it’s pretty interesting.

10

At least one letter was dropped…the “thorn” which looked like a “y”.

Perhaps you’ve seen quaint old shop signs like:

YE OLDE SHOPPE

and the people would pronounce it “ye” instead of “the”, thus the letter was dropped to avoid confusion.

11

This has been done several times. One link that often comes up is this nifty animation. Quite a graphical view of the evolution of what we today call ‘the latin alphabet’.
(Right now the page is down. I hope it’ll come back soon, but you can have a look in googles cache, although you won’t get the animation.)

If you click around there for a while I’m sure you’ll find more than you want.

As to the late arrivals, Cecil wrote a piece called Why is there an I Street and a K Street but no J Street in Washington, D.C.? whare he claims:

12

Oops, I missed that Bob55 had already provided the same link. Anyway it’s so good that it deservs being linked to twice.

13

From what I remember from my Latin classes, there is a reason why folks have been so slow on the uptake of the new characters J and U that sorted out the ambiguities of I and V:
The romans used their letters a lot to carve them into stone (think of memorials), where it is much easier to write a straight line than to write a curve. So masons would still use I and V a long time after J and U have been around.
So far what I remember being taught. Now my own thoughts on that:
Inscriptions on memorials and the like may have had a much bigger impact on how people used letters than “everyday scribble” done on papyrus, paper, whatever. So they would use I and V instead of J and U just to appear educated.

14

Oo, oo’o o MCMXX’o ooooo “ooooo ooo”.

15

The idea of “O” being the oldest letter is, I think, probably correct. It appears in ancient Phoenician, and on the Moabite stone (dated to 9th century BC) and is the only letter in that list that still retains its sound and shape into Latin. The only other shape on that stone that is recognizable as a letter of the Latin aphabet is a W-shape, which had the S-sound at that time, so doesn’t count.

16

The thorn is actually on the character set: þ (as in ‘þe’) in an ‘Olde Englisch’ font it looks a lot like a ‘y’ though it’s pronounced ‘th’, there was also another ‘th’ letter with a slightly diffrent sound in English the eth: ð which was also used for the ‘th’ sound in ‘the’ (i.e. ðe) in some dialects of middle English (i.e. East midlands).

17

The thorn (þ) is pronounced as a voiced th, as in that' or the’ (in most dialects). The eth (ð) is the unvoiced th, as in `thin’.

As a general rule, in voiced sounds, the vocal cords vibrate. In unvoiced sounds, they do not.

And, if I’m not mistaken, Icelandic still has both characters.

18

Damn smilies!

Let’s try that again:

Thorn: (þ)
Eth: (ð)

19

Dex, a couple of nitpicks:

There are a couple of other letters on the Stone whose shapes are recognizable in the Latin alphabet: these include one shaped like an X and pronounced as T, and another shaped like a Y and pronounced W (or V).

The letter there that looks like a W was pronounced, as far as I know, SH rather than S. (It appears, for example, on the first line of the Stone as part of Mesha’s name.) The Greeks, having no need for this sound, borrowed the symbol, rotated it 90 degrees, and used it for the sound of S.

More to the point, though: the Phoenician O has not retained its original sound either. It’s the ancestor of the Hebrew letter ayin and the Arabic ayn, and like them it represents a guttural consonant. (Vowel sounds were not represented at all in the Phoenician script.)

So in short, I don’t think there’s any Phoenician letter that has maintained both its shape and sound to the present day.