Good day Worthy Knights,
In this part 96, the Letter V for the U Wikipedia
The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language and its extensions used to write modern languages.
It is generally believed that the Latin alphabet used by the Romans was derived from the Old Italic alphabet used by the Etruscans. That alphabet was derived from the Euboean alphabet used by the Cumae, which in turn was derived from the Phoenician alphabet.
Old Latin alphabet
It included 21 different characters. The letter (C) was the western form of the Greek gamma, but it was used for the sounds /g/ and /k/ alike, possibly under the influence of Etruscan, which might have lacked any voiced plosives. Later, probably during the third century BC, the letter (Z) – unneeded to write Latin properly – was replaced with the new letter (G), a (C) modified with a small horizontal stroke, which took its place in the alphabet. From then on, (G) represented the voiced plosive /g/, while (C) was generally reserved for the voiceless plosive /k/. The letter (K) was used only rarely, in a small number of words such as Kalendae, often interchangeably with (C).
Medieval and later developments
De chalcographiae inventione (1541, Mainz) with the 23 letters. J, U and W are missing.
It was not until the Middle Ages that the letter (W) – originally a ligature of two (V)s – was added to the Latin alphabet, to represent sounds from the Germanic languages which did not exist in medieval Latin, and only after the Renaissance did the convention of treating (I) and (U) as vowels, and (J) and (V) as consonants, become established. Prior to that, the former had been merely allographs of the latter.
With the fragmentation of political power, the style of writing changed and varied greatly throughout the Middle Ages, even after the invention of the printing press. Early deviations from the classical forms were the uncial script, a development of the Old Roman cursive, and various so-called minuscule scripts that developed from New Roman cursive, of which the insular script developed by Irish literati and derivations of this, such as Carolingian minuscule were the most influential, introducing the lower case forms of the letters, as well as other writing conventions that have since become standard.
Spread
The Latin alphabet spread, along with the Latin language, from the Italian Peninsula to the lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea with the expansion of the Roman Empire. The eastern half of the Empire, including Greece, Anatolia, the Levant, and Egypt, continued to use Greek but Latin was widely spoken in the western half, and as the western Romance languages evolved out of Latin, they continued to use and adapt the Latin alphabet.
With the expansion of Western Christianity during the Middle Ages, the script was gradually adopted by the peoples of northern Europe who spoke Celtic languages (displacing the Ogham alphabet) or Germanic languages (displacing earlier Runic alphabets), Baltic languages, as well as by the speakers of several Uralic languages, most notably Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian. The Latin alphabet came into use for writing the West Slavic languages and several South Slavic languages, as the people who spoke them adopted Roman Catholicism.
Later, it was adopted by non-Catholic countries. Romanian, most of whose speakers are Orthodox, was the first major language to switch from Cyrillic to Latin script, doing so in the 19th century, although Moldova only did so after the fall of the Soviet Union.
It has also been increasingly adopted by Turkic-speaking countries, beginning with Turkey in the 1920s. After the Soviet collapse, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan all switched from Cyrillic to Latin. The government of Kazakhstan announced in 2015 that the Latin alphabet would replace Cyrillic as the writing system for the Kazakh language by 2025.
SPQR – Senatus Populusque Roma