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Visual History of the Latin Alphabet

https://uclab.fh-potsdam.de/arete/en
32•speckx•1d ago

Comments

WillAdams•5h ago
F.W. Goudy has a nice bit in one of his books where it is shown how the lowercase _g_ developed from the uppercase --- I also have a photocopy of page from a calligraphy text where it advocates for using the older script forms for headings, more recent for subheads, and then setting body text in current/recent styles, using age as a guide to hierarchy, which I've done for a couple of projects and it can have a nice effect.
behnamoh•4h ago
Why do Ç, å, é, etc. exist? Why didn't people come up with new characters? Why use "sh" and "ch" instead of making a new character for those sounds? (Maybe other languages do this but English doesn't).
yorwba•3h ago
The timeline starts with 22 characters for Capitalis Monumentalis and ends with 26 characters in upper and lower case each for Sans-Serif. People did come up with new characters (JKUW), you're simply used to them.
gwd•1h ago
In the case of K, U, and W, those were borrowed from Greek, weren't they?

Not sure where J came from.

One question is why we borrowed K when we already had C. In modern English, C is more or less a completely superfluous letter, adding unnecessary complexity to pronunciation. Seeing my son try to pronounce "cycle" is one of many examples.

tdeck•54m ago
On the subject of C, folks may enjoy this video on the letter's history: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=chpT0TzietQ
ryao•32m ago
The Latin alphabet was based on the Etruscan alphabet, which was based on the Greek alphabet, which was based on the Phoenician alphabet. In early Latin, C, G and K were all pronounced the same way. They later dropped G, only to bring it back when they realized that they used C to refer to two different consonants, and wanted to disambiguate them. They assigned the less common constant to G.

J was introduced because I had a similar problem, except I could be either a consonant or a vowel, rather than any of two consonants. The same applied to the introduction of U for V. Well, almost the same. In the case of I, they added J to be the consonant, while in the case of V, they added U to be the vowel.

Finally, people changed the pronunciation of V over time to be something new, and W was introduced to be the original sound in English. W does not exist in Latin since V fulfills its role, unless you are using a modern pronunciation that changes how V is pronounced and then you still do not need W. There were other sound changes (see Italian), but this is sufficient to explain all of the letters. Well, there is also Z, which they removed from early Latin and later reintroduced to represent a Greek sound.

create-username•1h ago
People must come up with new characters because they lack their own script. You can either have a script adapted to your language, or make the best of what you’ve got.

English doesn’t. Bernard Shaw tried inventing new letters. I guess that changing the English alphabet os a slippery slope. If you make it as phonetic as the Latin script is meant to be, and with special characters, people would have to relearn how to read from scratch

ryao•39m ago
If people followed the alphabetic principle for English, the written language would become unintelligible due to all of the regional variations in pronunciation causing there to be many variations of the same words.
guappa•16m ago
you mean like there is color and colour?
nlitened•1h ago
Written characters and sounds don't usually correspond because pronunciation drifts very quickly in time (even two consecutive generations might have noticeably different pronunciation), and in different directions in different locations, while rules of "proper writing" change rarely, usually as a result of people agreeing to change them in order to catch up to an apparent accumulated drift of pronunciation.

As I understand (in a simplified way), every once in a while (once in a few centuries) there's a major language reform to make written form reflect current pronunciation as much as possible, but already in 100—200 years people would start asking "why do we write not like we pronounce", until some political movement decides reforming orthography would promote their agenda. Then the cycle continues.

bloak•56m ago
It seems a bit of an arbitrary choice. For example, Polish has digraphs, but Czech has diacritics, and Icelandic has a couple of additional letters that aren't modified Latin letters.

Old English had four letters that are not in today's US-ASCII, two of which are borrowed from a runic alphabet rather than created by modifying Latin letters.

It's also a bit arbitrary whether a modified Latin letter is regarded as a new character or an existing character modified by a diacritic: take Ø, for example. And there are characters like Æ. And never forget what Turkish did: add dotless i so that ordinary i could then be regarded as dotless i plus a diacritic (though of course it isn't usually regarded that way).

guappa•19m ago
Consider that runic letters come from latin letters normally.
rkagerer•4h ago
Interesting how clear the original, pre-200BC ones are to read, and how they get less legible in the interim until modern times. Guess what's old is new again.
raldi•3h ago
They went from chiseling stone to writing on parchment.
t-3•2h ago
Probably more that the artifacts with the most ancient handwriting have been destroyed by time and so all we have left are the chiseled and carved samples. Monuments designed for display are going to have very clear and legible text which is hard to misread so that everyone knows that the person who commissioned it was really awesome, while handwritten cursive often only needs to mostly legible to one reader.
tempodox•2h ago
Interesting! I'm curious, in the Rustic Capitals, would different forms of what looks like the same letter imply different pronunciations, or did those variations have other functions?
bryanrasmussen•1h ago
anyone have any knowledge of what libraries, visualization tools were used for this?
paganel•1h ago
Really, really cool visualisation!

Even though I know almost nothing at all about the subject of medieval palaeography in Western Europe, I did read recently the write-downs of a Italian conference focused on the subject of palaeography in the Italian Middle Ages, and that is how I learned about stuff like La minuscola cancelleresca and La mercantesca. A link (in Italian, google translate can help) [1] about these two styles of writing and how they were formed:

> la MINUSCOLA CANCELLERESCA, usata dai notai e dalla classe colta non universitaria, e la MERCANTESCA, scrittura professionale dei mercanti, usata anche per testi letterari (ma solo in lingua volgare).

via google translate

> the MINUSCULE CANCELLERESCA, used by notaries and the non-university educated class, and the MERCANTESCA, the professional writing of merchants, also used for literary texts (but only in the vernacular).

[1] https://spotlight.vatlib.it/it/latin-paleography/feature/17-...

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