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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 ...
This Greek alphabet was the first to assign letters not only to consonant sounds, but also to vowels. The Roman Empire further developed and refined the Latin alphabet, beginning around 500 BCE. During the fifth and sixth centuries, the development of lowercase letters began to emerge in Roman writing.
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 ...
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.
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 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] Those adapting the Phoenician system added three letters to the end of the series, called the "supplementals". Several varieties of the Greek alphabet developed.
The letter now known as sigma took its name from sāmekh but its form from šin, while the letter San, which occurred in a few dialects only, took its name from šin but its place in the alphabet from ṣādē. A further Greek letter of uncertain origin, sampi, is found occasionally, and may represent an affricate, such as [t͡s].
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.