Visual History of the Latin Alphabet

by speckx • 1 year ago

148 83 1 year ago

WillAdams2• 1 year 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.

behnamoh3• 1 year 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• 1 year 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.

gwd2• 1 year 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.

adrian_b2• 1 year ago

There has never been a 22-character Latin alphabet.

The original Latin alphabet had 21 letters. Then G has replaced Z, without changing the number of letters. Then, by the time of the Empire, Y and Z have been added at the end (the same Z that had been removed earlier, while Y had the same origin as V, but by this time it had acquired a distinct pronunciation in Greek).

Then the Latin alphabet had 23 letters for more than 1000 years.

It has grown to 26 letters during the Middle Ages, with the addition of J, U and W ("u" was originally the small letter form of "V"; distinct letters U and V have been created by making a capital "U" and a small "v").

create-username• 1 year 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

ryao3• 1 year 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.

nlitened• 1 year 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.

kergonath• 1 year ago

Written characters and sounds don't usually correspond because pronunciation drifts very quickly in time

In space as well. Local accents can be quite variable. This alone dooms any “we should write words as we pronounce them” to fail unless every region has its own orthographic rules, which would be honestly terrible.

Anarch157a• 1 year ago

Some languages do it way more frequently. Take my native Portuguese. Brazil had 3 ortographic reforms in the 20th century, while Portugal had 5 in the same period, all before the "Ortographic Accord" of 1990, that unified ortography in both countries.

bloak• 1 year 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).

guappa2• 1 year ago

Consider that runic letters come from latin letters normally.

legulere• 1 year ago

Also not all letters of the English alphabet are universally used or existed in latin: latin didn't discern v and u, and there was no w.

Kwpolska• 1 year ago

Polish has digraphs (ch, cz, dz, dź, dż, rz, sz), trigraphs (dzi), and diacritics (ąćęłńóśźż).

jhanschoo2• 1 year ago

- Historically in writing, many accents come from letters written above or below, or there was an existing use of the same letter for distinct sounds, so it was natural to mark existing letters rather than create new ones out of whole cloth.

- The use of digraphs is frequently due to historical sound changes; first, certain sound combinations changed valence, but others do not. Then one rewrites with the digraphs with the other instances by analogy. Sometimes it comes from borrowing; for example the historical use of "ch" to denote the historic greek "chi", or aspirated chi sound, as in "chronograph"

- Finally, it is easier to modify a existing type, or arrange movable type, to include an accent rather than to create one from scratch.

HelloNurse• 1 year ago

Altering letters with combining marks (often derived from other letters and not invented from scratch) is not only easier to learn than complete novel letters, but also consistent enough to allow learning by analogy: dieresis, grave accent, acute accent, tilde, macron and the like affect different phonemes in similar ways.

senderista• 1 year ago

See Irish for some very unintuitive use of digraphs.

aarroyoc• 1 year ago

In Spanish, we consider Ñ to be a different letter, with its key in keyboards and under a different chapter in dictionaries. Of course you could say that it's just an N with a ~. But that tilde is not defined for any other letter. Why did they do it? In medieval Spanish it was common to write two Ns in many words, with a different sound. For example: "anno", which is now: "año" (year). Two Ns was very similar to M so the tilde was added to remark that it was two Ns, not one M. Later, they just wrote one N with the tilde.

dragonwriter3• 1 year ago

And, while its not the case any more, but illustrates how arbitrary the "new letter" vs. "new sound for old letter or combination" is "ll" also was considered its own letter for ~250 years.

starmandx• 1 year ago

Never learned Spanish, so I did not know this! But it makes sense, just like in German: ß is ss, ä is ae, ö is oe, and ü is ue.

cryptonector2• 1 year ago

Worse, in Spanish it used to be that 'll' and 'ch' were until recently digraphs considered separate letters, which meant that they would sort as such too. That is incredibly annoying to implement.

DuMOHsmol• 1 year ago

Slavic languages originally used the very unique Glagolitic script, developed by saints Cyril and Methodius. However, their disciples later created an alternative Greek-based script, which eventually prevailed.

My guess is that the educated people of the time were very familiar with Greek, so it was easier for them to work with Greek letters rather than the newly invented ones. It probably was the same for Latin-based scripts as well.

mananaysiempre4• 1 year ago

Worth remembering that all of the people you mention were Bulgarian Eastern Orthodox monks and missionaries, so for them Greek was both the international vernacular and geographically close.

tokai3• 1 year ago

Å is a new character. It is not an a with an accent. It was created to replace the non letter aa.

behnamoh3• 1 year ago

But visually it's still an "A" with a "°" on top. Why not create an entirely new letter?

dcminter• 1 year ago

I (no expert, hopefully one will be along in a minute) have heard that in Swedish the letters äöå all evolved from corresponding diphthongs - so ae oe and ao respectively. Because the pronounciation changed from what one would assume from the literal spelling it made sense to create new letters to keep things consistent. They are considered to be entirely different letters by the way - much as you wouldn't consider O and Q to be the same letter with an accent.

In Swedish dictionaries those letters are added to the end of the alphabet - it's surprisingly hard to internalise that and remember to look up Å words at the end of the dictionary and not the front...

Edit: tokai below says Å was AA originally not AO so I (unsurprisingly) stand corrected: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44317851

mananaysiempre4• 1 year ago

The umlaut comes from an e written above the letter, and is thus historically distinct from the diaeresis aka tréma (as in Noël, naïve). I first realized after that looking at Fraktur street signs in Vienna, where it is more like two vertical lines, but the most immediate understanding will probably come after looking at the lowercase e in a table of Kurrentschrift[1].

Which, incidentally, is missing in TFA. Funny how thoroughly the Nazis managed to erase that piece of German legacy (and the only modern Latin-script cursive distinct not coming from the familliar Irish>Italian lineage).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurrent

NoMoreNicksLeft• 1 year ago

Cyrillic has letters for both sh and ch. Greek has letters for both phonemes of th. Alphabets have alot of inertia after their initial foundation. That's why even when they make new letters they're almost always diacritics or ligatures. Hell, English did this with &, but we decided that it was punctuation instead of a new letter.

Completely off-topic, why the hell does Hangul's G look like a backwards Gamma? Is that coincidence, there's no way that was borrowed from the other side of the planet.

mananaysiempre4• 1 year ago

Cyrillic has letters for both sh and ch.

(With the one for sh, ш, having been borrowed from the Hebrew for sh/s/th, ש.)

And yet there have been some ligatures converted into letters following sound changes, as in ЪІ > Ы for [ɨ] (in Russian and Belarusian) or ІО > Ю for [ʉ] (in Bulgarian, Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian).

andoando• 1 year ago

Armenian has 39 characters. We distinguish between puh and pah, tuh and tah, zsh and zch, tsh and tch, etc

dragonwriter3• 1 year 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).

English doesn't? Explain "w".

bazoom424• 1 year ago

W is a ligature of “vv” which turned into a distict letter, similar to how “ae” turned into the letter æ. New letters in latin scripts seem to have evolved from either diacritics or ligatures. There are a few examples of letters borrowed from non-latin alphabets like þ in Old English

kjkjadksj• 1 year ago

Croatian has these as š or č/ć

bazoom424• 1 year ago

Characters like å and ø are considered distinct letters but they originated as diacritics. Diacritics are small symbols which can be added to existing text to remove ambiguities and aid in pronounciation. So the scripts started with the latin alphabet and then added various squiggles to the existing letters.

rkagerer• 1 year 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.

raldi2• 1 year ago

They went from chiseling stone to writing on parchment.

t-33• 1 year 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.

jhanschoo2• 1 year ago

The Roman cursive is illegible to modern eyes, as is the archaic script. You may think that the archaic script would be legible once you learn the correspondence, but don't be fooled by their geometric simplicity; they possess a lot of variation in forms (still geometric due to their inscriptional nature) across time and space. Likewise, the modern lowercase letters are likely illegible to ancient Roman eyes. The inscriptional Roman styles have remained legible, because Italic typesetters and printers (see Renaissance Antiqua) have consciously revived the monumental forms for the capitals. (Contrast the ornate capitals of Fraktur, or of English Roundhand).

WillAdams2• 1 year ago

Fra. Edward Catich (whose minimally credited research was used by Carol Twombly to make Adobe's Trajan) wrote extensively on this, and how brush work influenced the roman letters.

tempodox• 1 year 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?

cjs_ac• 1 year ago

Rustic capitals were used for ordinary writing, e.g., election slogans on the building walls of Pompeii. Different forms of each letter are just stylistic variations between scribes, or contextual variations (the third 'G', for example, would only be used on the last line of text).

Latin had a very regular orthography: with the exceptions of I/J and U/V, and digraphs used to transliterate Greek, all letters had exactly one pronunciation. The distinctions between I and J, and between U and V, are mediaeval innovations to aid literacy.

bryanrasmussen2• 1 year ago

anyone have any knowledge of what libraries, visualization tools were used for this?

jamessb• 1 year ago

Looking at the page source shows that it is vanilla JS [1] with a few libraries:

* https://anseki.github.io/leader-line/

* https://barba.js.org/docs/getstarted/intro/

* https://swiperjs.com/

[1] https://uclab.fh-potsdam.de/arete/assets/js/application.js

bryanrasmussen2• 1 year ago

thanks, looks like it's leader-line that does most of the layout. I couldn't find it earlier on google, but now I see that was because the helpful AI had some stuff about fishing and I missed it.

paganel• 1 year 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-...

naikrovek2• 1 year ago

This seems more like an evolution of a few fonts than it does the Latin alphabet.

hemmert• 1 year ago

Beautiful!

rf152• 1 year ago

Not sure if it's just my browser, but this just looks like a simple visualisation of which found texts where written in which style, when. It says absolutely nothing about the relationship and how the different strands evolved together, nor their locality.

Additionally, it counts modern font inventions as variants of the Latin Alphabet (a somewhat strange but acceptable interpretation) but then proceeds to not show its variants, despite the historic glyphs being shown in multiple variants each.

I find it lacking.

rf152• 1 year ago

Turns out: in the end it was my phone browser that didn't show some of the connecting lines due to its Dark Mode Plugin. This is much cooler on Desktop!

aitchnyu• 1 year ago

I thought it was going to include the Cuneiform and Phoenician ancestors for each letter. I had 1990s World Book set where each book showed the evolution of each letter across civilizations.

https://old.reddit.com/r/latin/comments/c0eeqi/colorized_cha...

matada_• 1 year ago

I wish the English language could just get rid of the redundant letter, it would make like much easier for new learners.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_refo...

t-33• 1 year ago

For new learners, maybe, but what about more advanced learners and users? And how many letters are you going to add to get rid of all the overloaded sounds? If you read "A grup of jenarals inishietid a coo", it's easy enough to pronounce, but all the context and parallels to other languages are lost, which means that eg. a native speaker of a Romance language might not immediately recognize that general is the same as the word in their native language modulo some accents.

Visual History of the Latin Alphabet

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