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Many Greek letters are similar to Phoenician, except the letter direction is reversed or changed, which can be the result of historical changes from right-to-left writing to boustrophedon, then to left-to-right writing. Global distribution of the Cyrillic alphabet. The dark green areas shows the countries where this alphabet is the sole main ...
A letter can be formal or informal, depending on its audience and purpose. Besides being a means of communication and a store of information, letter writing has played a role in the reproduction of writing as an art throughout history. [1] Letters have been sent since antiquity and are mentioned in the Iliad. [2]
The history of the Greek alphabet began as early as the 8th century BC, when the Greeks adapted the Phoenician alphabet for their own use. [58] The letters of the Greek alphabet generally visually correspond to those of the Phoenician alphabet, and both came to be arranged using the same alphabetical order. [58]
The letter j is i with a flourish; u and v are the same letter in early scripts and varied according to position in insular half-uncial and caroline minuscule and later scripts; W is a ligature of vv; in Anglo-Saxon insular the rune wynn is used as a w and thorn (þ) for th.
The novel forms are aitch, a regular development of Medieval Latin acca; jay, a new letter presumably vocalised like neighboring kay to avoid confusion with established gee (the other name, jy, was taken from French); vee, a new letter named by analogy with the majority; double-u, a new letter, self-explanatory (the name of Latin V was ū); wye ...
These Latin-script alphabets may discard letters, like the Rotokas alphabet, or add new letters, like the Danish and Norwegian alphabets. Letter shapes have evolved over the centuries, including the development in Medieval Latin of lower-case, forms which did not exist in the Classical period alphabet.
A language may represent a given phoneme by combinations of letters rather than just a single letter. Two-letter combinations are called digraphs, and three-letter groups are called trigraphs. German uses the tetragraphs (four letters) "tsch" for the phoneme German pronunciation: and (in a few borrowed words) "dsch" for [dʒ]. [87]
The letter eth ð was an alteration of Latin d , and the runic letters thorn þ and wynn ƿ are borrowings from futhorc. Also used was a symbol for the conjunction and , a character similar to the number seven ( ⁊ , called ond or a Tironian et ) which is still used in Irish and Scottish Gaelic , and a symbol for the relative pronoun þæt , a ...