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The Latin alphabet is the main writing system in use in the Western world and is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world.〔http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/331677/Latin-alphabet〕 It is the standard script of the English language and is often referred to simply as "the alphabet" in English. It is a true alphabet which originated in the 7th century BC in Italy and has changed continually over the last 2500 years. It has roots in the Semitic alphabet and its offshoot alphabets, the Phoenician, Greek, and Etruscan. The phonetic values of some letters changed, some letters were lost and gained, and several writing styles ("hands") developed. Two such styles, the minuscule and majuscule hands, were combined into one script with alternate forms for the lower and upper case letters. Due to classicism, modern uppercase letters differ only slightly from their classical counterparts. There are few regional variants. ==Summary of evolution== The Latin alphabet started out as uppercase serifed letters known as roman square capitals. The lowercase letters evolved through cursive styles that developed to adapt the formerly inscribed alphabet to being written with a pen. Throughout the ages, many dissimilar stylistic variations of each letter have evolved that are still identified as being the same letter. After the evolution of the alphabet from the Western Greek Alphabet through Old Italic alphabet, G developed from C, the letter J developed from a flourished I, V and U split and the ligature of VV became W, the letter thorn Þ was introduced from the runic alphabet but was lost in all languages except Icelandic, and the letter s could be written either as a long s (ſ) inside a word or as a terminal s at the end or after a long s (ß) after the 7th century AD, but the long s was generally abandoned in the 19th century. However, thanks to classical revival, Roman capitals were reintroduced by humanists making Latin inscriptions easily legible to modern readers while many medieval manuscripts are unreadable to an untrained modern reader, due to unfamiliar letterforms, narrow spacing and abbreviation marks with some exceptions of some marks such as the apostrophe and the exception of Carolingian minuscule letters (lower caps) which were mistaken for Roman. Additionally the phonetic value of the letters has changed from its origins and is not constant across the languages adopting the Latin alphabet, such as English or French, often the orthography does not fully match the phonetics, resulting in Homophonic heterographs (words written differently but sounding the same) such as in English and adopting digraphs for new sounds, such as sh for Voiceless postalveolar fricative in English. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「History of the Latin alphabet」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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