Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: III. THE LATIN ALPHABET. In its earliest form, the Latin alphabet consisted of 21 characters,—A, B, C, D, E, F, Z, H, I, K, L, M, N, 0, P, Q, R, S, T, V, X. These letters were derived from the alphabet used by the Dorian Greeks of Campania. At a very early period the letters K and Z fell into disuse, although K continued to occur in a few ancient abbreviations, such as Kal. for Kalendae, K. S. for earus suis, K. K. for calumniae causa (a legal phrase), KK. for oastrorum, KA. for capitalis; and the use of Z was subsequently revived in transliterating Greek words. Originally, the character C had the sound which was afterwards given to G; but when K was abandoned, C took its place and its sound; while a new letter, G, was formed by slightly changing the original C. Plutarch says that the character G was first employed by Spurius Carvilius about the year 230 B.c. In Cicero's time the letter Y was introduced to represent the sound of the Greek T; but its presence in a word always marks a foreign origin, so that the character can scarcely be regarded as an essential part of the Roman alphabet. About the year A.d. 44, the Emperor Claudius tried to introduce three new symbols into the alphabet: (1) the inverted diagamma J to mark the consonantal sound of V; (2) the character known as "anti-sigma" 0 to express the sound denoted by the Greek if (ps or bs); and (3) the sign I-, which was to have the sound of the Greek v, i.e. of modern French u or German u. It may be mentioned also, that consonants were not doubled in writing Latin until the practice was adopted from the Greek by Ennius (b.c. 239-169), who in various ways conformed Koman usages to those of the Greeks. The Koman alphabet, like the early alphabet of the Greeks, lacked distinctive characters for the long and short v...