Talk:Latin alphabet/Archive 1

message: I can guess what OF, F, means, but LL ... ? Please expand the various abbreviations at least once, and better every time -- we don't have to save paper. The only excuse IMHO is if it becomes a bore to read (but reformulation is probably better then).  --Robbe
P.S.: Yes, I used IMHO up there. And now P.S., I'm obviously a repeat offender ... My argument is that (a) talk pages have less stringent "rules", and that (b) these abbreviations are more widely understood in this social context than F for French.
:Uhhh... hello, Robbe? LL is not an abbreviation. --Ashi
::Open Webster's Dictionary and you find those abbreviations mean Old French, French and Late Latin.  Relevant to etymology, but not the development of the alphabet. Cbdorsett 19:41, 11 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Use of abbreviations

message: This article should probably be rescoped to be the "Latin Script", not the "Latin Alphabet".  Script is the technical / academic term for the writing system as a whole, including word formation, punctuation, and line layout. The term alphabet strictly covers only the letters in the script.  Also, some scripts such as Chinese-derived scripts are not based on alphabets.  This same comment applies to Greek Alphabet and other "Alphabet" articles.  I don't feel ready to take the time to implement this change now, though.  --Jdlh
:This article isn't about word formation, punctuation, and line layout. It is about the Latin Alphabet, and that's why it's called "Latin alphabet". Also, "Latin alphabet" is the more commonly used name than "Latin script" by a factor of more than 3 to 1 . "Script" is a technical term used to generalize all the different writing systems, but an alphabet is a kind of script, so why not be precise? If you think there are enough distinctions between "Latin script" and "Latin alphabet", why don't you create a Latin script article that contains information about the Latin script? Nohat 03:53, 2004 Apr 23 (UTC)
* I think it is OK to have an article just on the alphabet (it is too long already as such). There is already an article on the Latin language.  So the details of the script that lie between the two could go into an article Latin orthography or Latin spelling.Jorge Stolfi 01:35, 23 Apr 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Rename to "Latin script"?

message: How come there is no mention of Æ or Œ in English in the article? Rmhermen 02:03, Nov 25, 2003 (UTC)
:Or in Latin, for that matter. They were definitely used in Medieval Latin, and in some pronunciation systems they stood for distinct vowel sounds.Jorge Stolfi 01:35, 23 Apr 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: In English Æ and Œ are mere ligatures, not separate letters. Ligatures are of the field of typography, not of alphabets. Certainly both are letters in their own right in some scandinavian languages, but not in English. Therefore they're mentioned in the Ligatures section, as it's the appropriate one. --logixoul 11:57, 17 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: AE and OE ligatures

message: The original latin alphabet did not have G, Y or Z either. Somebody should correct that. Rumpelstiltskin 20:54, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Yeah I'll do that.Cameron Nedland 21:22, 1 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Very old Latin alphabet

message: I like this link. Not least because I, apparently, run the letter þ. Evertype 12:31, 2004 Dec 26 (UTC)
: Maybe so.  If someone knows an actual published reference for the idea that thorn came from the letter D, I'd bet you would be the first to provide it. :) Cbdorsett 20:06, 28 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Who runs the alphabet 

message: Nice job of cleaning out detritus.  Sure, what went on in Egypt in 1800 BC is interesting to everybody, but it has nothing to do with the later adoption of the alphabet from the Etruscans.  That info is already explained well somewhere else (I forget where, but it wouldn't be hard to find). Cbdorsett 17:45, 8 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Good edit, Mirv 

message: Explanation for why I reverted this edit: Alphabet, at the time, said "the alphabets of Europe, including the Roman alphabet and its descendants and the Cyrillic alphabet, developed for the eastern Slavic languages, and the runic alphabets are all themselves ultimately descended from the Greek alphabet." (emphasis is mine.) It was not entirely clear that "developed for the eastern Slavic languages" applied only to the Cyrillic alphabet, which explains the following gross misunderstanding that was inserted into this article:
:the alphabets of Europe, including the Latin alphabet and its descendants, as well as the Cyrillic alphabet, all developed from the eastern Slavic languages. 
As far as I know nobody thinks the Latin alphabet developed from an eastern Slavic language, but if there are theories to that effect a reference should be easy to find. —Charles P. (Mirv) 19:56, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  "for" vs. "from" 

message: I have a question I've been wondering about. When was the standard order of the Latin alphabet established? Was it ever different? What was the basis for this order, is there any rhyme or reason to it? For what purpose was the order created? Thanks. Deco 22:51, 2 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: It was derived from Etruscan. The Etruscan order itself came from an earlier, logographic script - that means that graphems didn't represent sounds, but ideas. Like drawing a snowflake to represent a snowflake. See History of the alphabet. BTW for the current roughly acoustic usage there is really no excuse for such an illogical and inconsistent order IMHO... And if it wasn't people's unnecessary conservatism, it would have been reformed quite a time ago. --logixoul 12:13, 17 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Order 

message: This article needs to be about the letters used to write ancient and modern Latin. The information here is all the Latin character set. These are not the same thing at all and is confusing the ongoing debate about what characters should be used in Wikipedia articles. --Tysto 17:29, 5 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Move to [[Latin character set]] and revise this article

message: There is a fundamental semantic and etymological difference between the umlaut and diaresis. The umlauts developed out of a small lowercase "e" superscribed on vowels and only now looks like a diaresis, but isn't semantically equivalent.
In German the letter "e with diaresis" isn't unheard of (although usually only in foreign names) but differs strongly form the a, o and u umlauts in that the absence of diaresis doesn't affect the semantics much.
The absence of an umlaut without proper transliteration (adding an e directly after the vowel that should be an umlaut) OTOH can have disastrous changes in meaning.
It's more than a pronunciation guide for a special case of a vowel (like, I would assume, the French accented vowels) and I'm pretty sure similar derived letters share that semantic significance.
I think the section should somehow emphasise that concept because it seems very non-intuitive to speakers of languages which don't have such letters (monolingual English speakers, for example) who easily mistake an umlaut for an "accented" vowel and don't know how to properly transliterate it in the absence of special characters (even the esszett ligature is more widely grepped than that -- although many don't have any idea on its meaning and thus actually seek information before attempting to transliterate it).
While these are not extensions of the basic alphabet per se (in German, at least), that is, the alphabet still only consists of the basic 26 letters in these languages, these special letters MAY have more importance than just vowels with fancy pronunciation superscripts.
I may seem nitpicky, but it's very annoying when every second English speaker out there seems to be obsessed with butchering your language whenever they can find a chance. Although I do like the neologism "uber-". -- Ashmodai 00:09, 18 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: There is no need to use German transliteration of umlauts in English unless the common English transliteration is to do it that way. For example the German word Zürich is usually spelt Zurich in English it is close to never spelt Zuerich; Goering is often spelt that way in English,  which is helpful becase there was an English Civil War general called Goring --PBS 09:13, 3 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Umlauts vs Diaresis as a pronunciation guide

message: An anonymous user changed the pronunciations in Latin of the names of the letters.  I suppose there are different choices (church latin versus classical latin?), but the change was incorrect.  It has both A and E being pronounced [ee], whereas I don't even thing IPA has such a diphthong, and if that's supposed to be an English language phonetic example, it's wrong.  [kvuu] for Q makes me think it was someone speaking some eastern european language, who thought that his language's pronunciation ought to go in instead.  Anyway, I noticed that the article doesn't have a similar table showing the pronunciations as they are in modern English, and I think it ought to. -lethe talk [ +] 13:29, 29 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  pronunciation of the names of the letters 

message: I've commented out this text at the end of the section:
:otherwise, the dipthong is read as "gh"
* Perhaps diphthong should really be digraph or just combination.
* "gh" has no set pronunciation in English - does it in Portuguese? Can this be made clearer.
* If diphthong really does refer to the "üi" of "lingüiça" vs "ui" in other words, what does this have to do with "gh"?
— Hippietrail 02:29, 31 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I think that the writer meant to say "digraph", not diphthong. The notation "gh" is not from Portuguese, but from Italian. It's just a way of saying that "gu" is pronounced as a hard "g". FilipeS 21:36, 4 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Use of diaeresis in Portuguese 

message: In the Overview section, the alphabet is indicated as being supplemented with G (among others), but is then listed out without G.  All the other supplementary letters are included, for a total of 25.  Maybe I'm missing something here, but I think it's just an oversight. Azaner 20:27, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Missing G? 

message: In the "Overview" section, someone has written that G was not part of the original Latin alphabet and was introdduced "later". For him (or her), G is a variant of C, like Ø is a variant of O:
:"by modification, as J was from I, G from C, Ø from O, eth Ð from D, yogh Ȝ from G, schwa Ə from E, or ezh ʒ from z; or..."
But if you read article G, you'll see that G replaced Z around 230 BC. So, if you consider G to be a later added letter, then you must consider Z as an "original letter". But what is an "original letter"? When we speak about Latin, we speak mainly about Classical Latin, dating back the 1st century BC. At this time, G was already a letter of the Latin alphabet. The alphabet used in Classical Latin was : A B C D E F G H I L M N O P Q R S T V X, with K used only in abreviations, and Y and Z added for greek borrowed words.
It makes no sense to mix in a same sentence the "addition" of G to the Latin alphabet and the addition of Ø, Ð, Ə,...
Švitrigaila 10:32, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Your argument makes no sense to me.  I know well what the article G states, since I helped write that part myself.  But if the letter G was added later (230 BC), and you do seem to agree that it was, it therefore cannot possibly be 'original' by any definition.  Yes, Z was indeed an "original letter" in its place (7th) before the 3rd century, but it literally lost its place and had to queue at the end, when it was much later re-added.  I'm not sure how this is hard to understand or a matter of dispute, but I'm reverting the change that makes G an "original letter', and asking for comments here on discussion. ፈቃደ (ውይይት) 16:53, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  G instead of Z 

message: I know the umlaut is most common in the Germanic lanuages, but is it ever used in Spanish?  Example:  Mayagüez and the Yagüez River in Puerto Rico.
:It's used above the "u" after "g" and before "e" or "i" when the "u" is not silent. The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me) 21:14, 1 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Except that it's not an umlaut (change of sound), but a diaeresis (divider). It indicates that gu or gu do not form a digraph, but are two separate letters. −Woodstone 21:25, 1 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Its not an 'umlaut' in French either, the vowel doesn't change sounds. Its a diaeresis (fr. trema).  Its not just the 'e' either (e.g. naive). DavidRF 06:45, 5 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Umlaut in Spanish? 

message: The "Letters of the alphabet" section is missing K and W. Maybe this is the "original" Latin alphabet (debatable), but it's certainly not, as it claims, "the Latin alphabet as used in English". Hairy Dude 19:25, 30 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  "as used in English"?! 

message: The image at Image:Older Latin glyphs.png that is referenced on this page appears to be gone if it ever actually existed.
Fhenning 00:00, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Broken Image  

message: I noticed the "The Latin Alphabet" table/diagram which appears on the page for this topic and elsewhere, and wondered if the name shouldn't be expanded to "The English Latin Alphabet" or perhaps "The Simple Latin Alphabet." Just as the original alphabet from Rome has been expanded, that process has continued and in some ways accelerated. We all know that - looking at diacritics and extended characters in the diverse uses this writing system has been put to - but perhaps it would do well to acknowledge that fact implicitly in such titles. "The Latin Alphabet" seems too final a pronouncement, and artuably neither accurate nor NPOV... --A12n 20:07, 8 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: It reflects current scholarly usage. Extensions are detailed at Alphabets derived from the Latin. --Pjacobi 20:16, 8 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  Thanks. Well there are a few of issues here. First, the Alphabets derived from the Latin page (thanks for the reference) uses the term "Basic Latin Alphabet" which seems to me to be more accurate and NPOV than "The Latin Alphabet." So there is the added issue of consistency within Wikipedia. Second, re academic usage I won't argue the point (not time to research it now). It may turn out to be a larger debate - to what degree are all characters (diacritics, etc.) "created equal"? - some are obviously older and more widely used, some are very limited in use, others range inbetween. Why the 26 that happen to be used in English and not some other number? Etc. That gets beyond where we need to discuss here, but for me points to the need to specify what "Latin alphabet" other than "The". (I haven't referenced other language editions of Wikipedia but that might also be informative.) --A12n 17:25, 12 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  "The Latin Alphabet" & its extended life 

message: This article has been delisted for the following reasons:
*Consider removing links that add little to the article or that have been repeated in close proximity to other links to the same article, as per Wikipedia:Manual of Style (links) and WP:CONTEXT.
*According to Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates), months and days of the week generally should not be linked. Years, decades, and centuries can be linked if they provide context for the article.
*Per WP:MSH, headings generally should not repeat the title of the article.
*To comply with WP:WIAGA criteria 2b, please add inline citations.
Hope this helps. Tarret 01:32, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Delisted GA

message: The article says:
It is generally held that the Latins adopted the western variant of the Greek alphabet in the 7th century BC from Cumae, a Greek colony in southern Italy. Roman legend credited the introduction to one Evander, son of the Sibyl, supposedly 60 years before the Trojan war, but there is no historically sound basis to this tale.  From the Cumae alphabet, the Etruscan alphabet was derived and the Latins finally adopted 21 of the original 26 Etruscan letters. 
This is a little unclear. I have always read that the Romans had inherited the alphabet from the Etruscans. Is the text supposed to mean that the Etruscans themselves had got the alphabet from Cumae?... FilipeS 15:30, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes. They got it from the Greeks by way of the Etruscans. — Gwalla | Talk 05:57, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Cumae, or the Etruscans?

message: *Support as nom. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 04:00, 6 March 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Survey