A Companion to School Classics Author:James Gow 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: together by some learned man of Alexandria who was acquainted with the early history of the alphabet. A new sign, (sampi, 900), was added at the end of the alph... more »abet, but it is not known when or from what source. It so happens that no inscription or manuscript has this sign before about A.D. 900. II. THE LATIN ALPHABET. 9. Origin. — In the oldest inscriptions of the various Italian peoples several alphabets arc found, differing from one another slightly in form but more in the number of signs employed. All of them are founded (though the mode is obscure) on the Chalcidian type of the Greek alphabet, which was diffused chiefly from Cumae, an old Chalcidian colony, founded about B.c. 800. The Chalcidian alphabet, found in the Greek inscriptions of Italy, shows the following forms : — A B CD E F X H ® J K V /" X O F Q K T V X D V. with the values This, with the exception of I (f) and the aspirates is manifestly the foundation of the Latin alphabet. The seventh letter, I, was probably at first retained for the use of s between two vowels, but was discarded when this sound had passed into r (e.g., amase to amare, arboxix to arboris, etc.). Its place was filled (temp. Appius Claudius Caecus, censor B.c. 312) by a new letter G which had become necessary, because C had somehowbegun to represent a £-sound. The letter K however, which had thus become superfluous, was for many hundred years yet retained in certain proper names, as Kalendae, Kaeso, and C kept its old value g in the abbreviations C., Cn., for Gaius, Gnaeus. The letters Y, Z were added to the Roman alphabet after B.C. 100, when Greek words were coining into common use, but they were never employed except in such words. N.B. — The Latin alphabet did not distinguish the vowel and consonant I, J, or U, V. 10....« less