The Roman Writing System

(as a note before you begin, know that when I use "//" to set apart a letter or two letters, I'm using those slashes to indicate that you make the sound within the slashes: Don't say the name of the letter inside them. For example, when you see /ks/ think of  the ksssss sound that x makes , don't say "kay. esss." to yourself.)

 

  No offense to the letter C but.... I've always had a certain amount of disdain for it. Yah I respect it for what it does for my last name, I mean without it I'd be Alyssa Ardon, which is no where near as cute as Alyssa Cardon, but I could just as easily be Alyssa Kardon and I think the kuteness would be fairly komparable.  I guess my problem with the letter C stems from the fakt that we kould easily live without it and have a 25 letter alphabet rather than a 26 letter one-- who wouldn't go for that??? In all seriousness, though: C steals the sound from S and K and really the only new thing it kontributes to our writing system is the "CH" sound in "churro" and quite honestly I think that sounds a lot like a J anyway so I honestly don't know why we don't jhange it.

    I doubt C will ever get taken out of our alphabet though, and it's not just bekause it's weird without it: C has been a part of this alphabet since the founding of Rome in 753 B.C., when the Romans first acquired their writing system. The Roman alphabet is what our writing system is based on, which was based in Etruscan language. (The Etruscans used a version of the Greek alphabet, a couple differences being the X for the /ks/ sound rather than for the guttural /kh/ sound [that we use in Christmas] and the H standing for the /h/ sound rather than just a vowel by itself [So, Etruscan style would be "Have" and Greek style just "Ave"]).

Rome eventually grew to absorb Etruria. 

    There were a couple of letters that the Greek alphabet had that the Etruscans just didn't use in their language: [b], [d], and [g] never occurred in the way they talked. They never got rid of those letters, though, because apparently, "when people encounter writing for the first time, they are often understandably slow and cautious about discarding elements of the system which serve no purpose with respect to their own language."1 So when the Romans, speaking Latin, encountered Etruscan writing, the Romans had use for B, D, and G.

Gamma (before it became C)

Koppa (before it became Q)

   And now we come to why we have the letter C!  What happened was, the Greeks had the letter Gamma which the Etruscans had no use for, and because the Greeks had used the letter Koppa  (which later became Q)  and K for different allophones of the same phoneme /k/, the Etruscans decided they could apply the same logic and use Gamma for the /k/ phoneme as well: the one that occurred before /i e/ in words. So, basically, the Etruscans assigned Gamma a new phoneme. When the Romans adopted this writing system, they followed suit. At that point, however, Gamma had evolved into a C shape. 

       So, for all the sounds we know K to make, the Romans used C, K, and Q (i.e. Koppa). C was also used for the phoneme /g/, so C represented two totally different sounds. To remedy this, Spurious Carvilius Ruga (the first Roman to open a fee-paying school) decided to differentiate the /k/ and /g/ phonemes by adding a stroke to C to make the new letter G. Around the same time G was added, the Etruscan letter Z was dropped because Latin had no /dz/-like sound. So G effectively replaced the useless letter Z. K was also kind of abandoned because it was redundant: with C and Q doing it's job, it really brought nothing new to the table.

    At this point, the Roman alphabet was 21 letters long: A B C D E F G H I (K) L M N O P Q R S T V X. The alphabet was almost perfectly phonemic. K still appeared in a few words which "retained an archaic orthography".

    The names given to these letters by the Etruscans and Romans are the direct ancestors to the names we refer to them by today. Most letters were named after the sound they made, but most consonants had the vowel /e/ added, giving us names like /pe, te/ for P and T, /el, es/ for L and S. C, K, and Q became /ke, ka, ku/ after their special usage. X was /eks/ rather than /kse/ because in Latin (and English, possible Etruscan) /ks/ never appeared as the initial sound in a word.

      When Rome conquered Greece around 146 B.C., the Greek language massively infiltrated Roman life. Greek words were adopted that the Roman alphabet could not accommodate: Y was added (the English name /wai/ is etymologically obscure, but to the Romans it was upsilon) and Z (/zed/).

    We came to our 26-letter alphabet as modern Romance languages began to emerge. J, U, and W were all added to accommodate the Italian and Germanic languages.

    The "basic" shapes of the Roman letters were the forms cut on stone used for inscriptions (now they are our "capital" letters). The inscription on Trajan's column is often referenced as Roman lettering at it's very finest.

Look at that beautiful lettering! We're zoomed in on the column here.

Close-up!

Trajan's Column in Rome.