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Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2018 March 8

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March 8

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Latin alphabet

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I am sure people had asked this before, but I have not find much about this subject:

  1. If /kʷ/ is a phoneme in the Classical Latin, why did they decide to write QU and not just Q?
  2. Why did they repeat the same mistake of Ancient Greek, and invent the letter X?
  3. Why the diphthong /ai/ was written AE and not AI?
  4. Why /k g/ were written C and were not distinguished in writing already from the beginning? יהודה שמחה ולדמן (talk) 21:44, 8 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Answer #1: it was probably influenced by Greek, which used koppa (briefly, including the period the Latin alphabet was borrowed from Greek) exclusively before back vowels; otherwise it used kappa. In Phoenician, kaph and koph had 2 slightly different sounds Greek didn't distinguish; the Greeks thus limited (and later, but after the Romans borrowed the Greek alphabet, removed) the use of koppa.

Answer #2. The history of chi is unknown.

Answer #3. I have no idea here.

Answer #4. This is pure speculation (regardless of how many people believe it.) The Greek alphabet used kappa and gamma for those sounds. In the Western form of the Greek alphabet, gamma looked like <. This form of the Greek alphabet was brought into Italy, including the Latins as one group of people from Italy. When the Italians borrowed the Greek alphabet, not only did they keep the < form of gamma; they changed zeta from an I with long horizontal lines into a symbol resembling [. The letters of gamma or <, kappa or K, and zeta or [ got confused because of their similar appearances. Combine this with the fact that the dz or ts affricate (zeta had dz in Greek and ts in other Italic languages of the time the alphabet was brought into Italy) was absent from Latin and you'll notice something. After a period of confusion, K was used so rarely because it was the hardest of the 3 letters to draw and its use became so sparse. Gamma (<) was curved into a C and became the usual sign for kappa's sound in Latin. Zeta ([) was altered into a G-like figure that became the letter G and got the sound of Greek gamma. Georgia guy (talk) 22:02, 8 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

  1. I am not sure how that answers my question.
  2. I am talking about Latin X, not the Greek Chi. But now mentioning it, why did greek have letters for [zd st ks ps]? יהודה שמחה ולדמן (talk) 00:00, 9 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
But Latin X came from Greek chi, so the origin of chi is also the origin of Latin X. As for your #1, it explains why QU was used in Latin but Q in general was not. The Latin letter V (called U; the V is simply its shape) was used for the consonant sound of w as well as the vowel sound of u, so it makes sense that they would use QU, not just Q. Georgia guy (talk) 00:13, 9 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Also see a reference desk archive that dates to August 28, 2017 for more about the answer to question #2. Georgia guy (talk) 00:17, 9 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
The answer for 3 is: it wasn't. Since question 1 refers to Classical Latin, I assume question 3 does as well. Classical Latin didn't have the diphthong /ai/. Written <ae> was pronounced [ae̯]. Old Latin, on the other hand, had <ai> which was probably pronounced like [ai̯]. This sound morphed into [ae̯] in Classical Latin, hence the change in spelling to <ae>. In Vulgar Latin, this sound continued its evolution, turning into a monophthong, /e/ (or /ɛː/? I forget). See Latin spelling and pronunciation#Diphthongs and Latin#Diphthongs for more details.--William Thweatt TalkContribs 01:09, 9 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@WilliamThweatt: I'm finding this [e̯] sound very difficult to search for. What does it mean? --Trovatore (talk) 11:20, 9 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Trovatore: The mark underneath is an IPA symbol marking a diphthong (International Phonetic Alphabet#Diphthongs).--William Thweatt TalkContribs 22:47, 9 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Ah, thanks very much. That explains why I wasn't having much luck searching for e̯ by itself. --Trovatore (talk) 22:54, 9 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Question 3 (and WilliamThweatt's answer) apply equally to the diphthong OE, which didn't get the same attention from the OP. Note that (at least in monumental inscriptions, don't know about manuscripts, graffiti, etc.) it wasn't just "AE" and "OE" but the ligatures Æ and Œ, which seem to indicate speakers did not feel Æ and Œ were just A + E and O + E (i.e. the sound of the 2nd element of the diphthongs was not exactly the same as the sound of the standalone letter E) It would be difficult to argue, I think, those two ligatures arose as scribal shorthand as more common letter combinations did not receive ligatures, plus they don't seem to save any time to draw or carve compared to the digraphs. Incidentally, did ligatures for A + I and O + I exist in Old Latin when the diphthongs AI and OI were still used? Basemetal 11:37, 9 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The answer to original question no. 4 is that the Etruscan language did not have an opposition between voiced and voiceless stops, so some letters of the borrowed Cumae western Greek alphabet were redundant for writing Etruscan. In early Latin, this somehow led to a strange situation where "C" was used both for [g] and for [k] before [e], [i], while "K" was used mainly for [k] before [a], and "Q" was used for [k] before [o], [u]. The rational thing to do would have been to use "C" for [g] and "K" for most [k], but that was not the path that was followed...
The early "C" ambiguity survived into Classical Latin in the use of "C" as an abbreviation for the name "Gaius", and has given rise to the non-existent form "Caius"[sic]. "Caius" should only exist in Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where it's a fancy-shmancy way of spelling the English name "Keyes"...   -- AnonMoos (talk) 03:11, 9 March 2018 (UTC) AnonMoos (talk) 03:05, 9 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Go tell that to Caius Marcius Coriolanus.... --Trovatore (talk) 23:44, 12 March 2018 (UTC) [reply]
  • But is G derived from C (as the WP article on the letter G claims) or is it derived from Z (as Georgia guy argues). I can see a good argument on Georgia guy's side: if Z had disappeared from the alphabet sometime in the 4th c. BC, it would be odd that the new letter G would have been added in the 3rd c. BC (about 100 years later) in its place as if a "hole" had been kept in the alphabet open and ready to receive a new letter. If the Z had disappeared the new letter G, supposedly a variant of C, would have been more likely to be added either right after C, or at the end of the alphabet where most new letters are usually added. Basemetal 10:52, 9 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Basemetal -- the memory that there had been a letter between F and H was kept alive by "model alphabets" (the practice of writing down a theoretical full alphabet which includes inherited letters which are not actually used in writing the language that you speak). We have some model alphabet inscriptions (mentioned briefly in the Etruscan language article), and in fact several Greek letters would likely not have survived through Etruscan to make it into the Latin alphabet without this practice... AnonMoos (talk) 14:27, 9 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
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