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Concept
Latin phonology and orthography
Summary
Latin phonology continually evolved over the centuries, making it difficult for speakers in one era to know how Latin was spoken before then. A given phoneme may be represented by different letters in different periods. This article deals primarily with modern scholarship's best reconstruction of Classical Latin's phonemes (phonology) and the pronunciation and spelling used by educated people in the late Roman Republic. This article then touches upon later changes and other variants. Knowledge of how Latin was pronounced comes from Roman grammar books, common misspellings by Romans, transcriptions into other ancient languages, and from how pronunciation has evolved in derived Romance languages.
Latin orthography is the spelling of Latin words written in the scripts of all historical phases of Latin from Old Latin to the present. All scripts use the Latin alphabet, but conventional spellings may vary from phase to phase. The Latin alphabet was adapted from the Old Italic script to represent the phonemes of the Latin language. The Old Italic script had in turn been borrowed from the Greek alphabet, itself adapted from the Phoenician alphabet. The Latin alphabet most resembles the Greek alphabet around 540 BC, as it appears on the black-figure pottery of the time.
The forms of the Latin alphabet used during the Classical period did not distinguish between upper case and lower case. Roman inscriptions typically use Roman square capitals, which resemble modern capitals, and handwritten text often uses old Roman cursive, which includes letterforms similar to modern lowercase.
In ancient Latin spelling, individual letters mostly corresponded to individual phonemes, with three main exceptions:
The vowel letters a, e, i, o, u, y represented both short and long vowels. The long vowels were often marked by apices during the Classical period ⟨Á É Ó V́ Ý⟩, and long i was written using a taller version ⟨I⟩, called i longa "long I": ⟨ꟾ⟩; but now long vowels are sometimes written with a macron in modern editions (ā), while short vowels are marked with a breve (ă) in dictionaries when necessary.
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