Как пишутся римские буквы

Арабская система счисления сейчас процветает повсюду, и ее использование — это некий стандарт. Это неудивительно: десятичная, позиционная система записи чисел очень удобна и логично устроена. С момента ее изобретения все остальные менее продвинутые вариации отошли на второй план. Тем не менее полностью они не исчезли: римской системой записи цифровых знаков мы пользуемся и по сей день, причем чаще, чем нам кажется.

Несмотря на то что мы пользуемся арабской системой счисления, периодически все же приходится набирать на клавиатуре римские цифры. Они иногда используются для записи веков, нумерования правителей или томов в книгах. Встречаются они и в неожиданных местах: при указании группы крови, валентности в химии или времени на механических часах. Одним словом, они все еще актуальны.

Способы

Конвертер

Если вам совсем лень разбираться, как набрать римские цифры на клавиатуре, воспользуйтесь одним из заботливо написанных специально для вас конвертеров. Вы легко найдете его по соответствующему запросу в поисковой системе. Пригодится он и скрупулезным, но осторожным людям, которым нужно записать длинное и сложное число.

Латинские буквы

Присмотритесь повнимательнее к римским цифрам. Они вам ничего не напоминают? Правильно, это всем нам знакомый латинский алфавит! Благодаря этому все их можно без труда набрать на английской клавиатуре (или другой, на которой раскладка с латиницей). Переключившись на иноязычную раскладку, вы сможете вводить любое римское число.

Римская система счисления — непозиционная, то есть каждая цифра в ней равна тому числу, которое она обозначает. Соответственно, чтобы написать длинное число, может понадобиться несколько раз употребить одну и ту же цифру. К счастью, есть определенные правила группировки, которыми тоже можно воспользоваться. Их мы рассмотрим далее.

Цифры от 1 до 3 не представляют сложности: I, II, III. Все они образованы с помощью буквы i из латиницы.

Цифра 4 чуть более сложна: здесь нужно задействовать математику. Специального обозначения для нее у римлян нет, зато есть обозначение для пятерки — V, а четверку получаем, отняв от нее единицу, что выражается перестановкой ее слева от пятерки: IV. Справа — прибавляем, слева — отнимаем. Все просто.

По этому же правилу получаем цифры 6 (VI), 7 (VII), 8 (VIII).

Для девятки используется уже новая буква — X, обозначающая 10. От нее мы, опять же, отнимаем единицу, чтобы вышло девять — IX. Думаю, на этом принцип стал вам понятен.

Для записи более крупных чисел нам понадобятся еще буквы, поэтому держите:

1. 50 — L;
2. 100 — C;
3. 500 — D;
4. 1000 — M.

Теперь вы сможете напечатать на клавиатуре любое римское число.

ASCII-коды

ASCII — это стандартная таблица символов Windows, в которой каждому символу отведен собственный цифровой код. Даже если вы не находите нужных знаков на клавиатуре (или их там и правда нет), вы сможете ввести их без посторонней помощи, ниоткуда их не копируя, если помните их номер наизусть. Для этого зажмите клавишу Alt и, не отпуская ее, введите цифры по порядку. Не предлагаем вам заучивать коды всех римских цифр, то есть латинских букв, а лучше приведем их здесь:

1. I = 73;
2. V = 86;
3. X = 88;
4. L = 76;
5. C = 67;
6. D = 68;
7. M = 77.

Зачем это все, если можно просто переключиться на английскую раскладку? На самом деле, такая информация не помешает, если по каким-то причинам вы не можете на нее переключиться или у вас попросту установлен только русский язык на компьютере. Конечно, писать длинные числа таким образом будет несладко, а вот пару-тройку символов — самое то!

Программные команды

В привычных нам программных продуктах есть немало неизвестных нам функций, которые порой и показались бы нужными, да не знает о них почти никто, кроме производителя и тех, кому они жизненно необходимы. Не выделяется на их фоне и Microsoft Word. Оказывается, в нем есть специальная команда, при включении которой обычные арабские цифры будут превращаться в римские.

Это магическое действие легко осуществить, совершив следующие действия:

1. Кликните по участку документа, где должно быть римское число.
2. Нажмите комбинацию Ctrl+F9. Это нужно для вызова поля для кода. Оно будет залито серым цветом, а справа и слева будут находиться фигурные скобки.
3. Введите следующую команду, заменив слова «арабское число» на необходимое вам:​

=арабское число*ROMAN

Теперь остается только нажать F9, чтобы команда заработала и цифры превратились в римские.

Резюмируя вышесказанное: набирать на клавиатуре римские цифры не так-то сложно! Советуем вам освоить их набор на английской клавиатуре, если приходится часто этим заниматься. Если же в повседневной жизни это вам не нужно, можете воспринимать эту статью как ознакомительную.

Видео

Посмотрите, как можно напечатать римские цифры в Ворде.

Выучить их несложно:

• 1 = I
• 5 = V
• 10 = X
• 50 = L
• 100 = C
• 500 = D
• 1000 = M

Все цифры от 1 до 100 (остальные по аналогии) можно посмотреть в таблице:

Где на клавиатуре римские цифры?

Отдельная нумерационная линейка на клавиатурах отсутствует. По своей сути римские цифры – это буквы латинского алфавита. Соответственно, для проставления нумерации мы переключаем раскладку на латиницу, чтобы вставить соответствующие буквы в верхнем регистре.

Как написать на клавиатуре персонального компьютера или ноутбука на операционной системе Windows?

Для перехода на латинский алфавит нам потребуется переключение раскладки клавиатуры на английскую версию. Это можно сделать так: в английской раскладке нажмите CapsLock и набирайте любые латинские буквы сразу в верхнем регистре.

Как набрать в Ворде (текстовый редактор Microsoft Office Word)?

Чтобы поставить римские цифры в текстовой программе Ворд, мы нажимаем заглавные буквы в английской версии, набирая нужное число.

Как ввести в тексте?

Для ввода цифр в римской системе используются следующие комбинации:

Некоторые буквы аналогичны русским (М, С), их можно напечатать и в русской версии раскладки.

Нумерация списка

Для проставления автоматической нумерации воспользуйтесь панелью инструментов – нам нужен раздел «Абзац» и функция нумерованного списка (не с точками или комбинированный). Далее выбирайте соответствующий вариант нумерации с римскими обозначениями. Можно ввести подпункты с числовой или символической нумерацией.

Как напечатать в экселе (табличный редактор Microsoft Office Excel)?

Аналогично включают раскладку клавиатуры на английский вариант и набирают буквы в верхнем регистре (см. п. 2). Есть еще вариант «Вставка символа» через меню «Вставка», где можно скопировать из алфавита соответствующую букву, но это займет больше времени.

Как сделать римские цифры в PowerPoint (редактор презентаций)?

Так как римские цифры – это текст, здесь потребуется функция вставки текста из панели инструментов. Нажав на нее, вы создадите рабочее окно, где можно набирать англоязычные цифры.

Если требуется автоматическая нумерация пунктов для текста, активируют меню списков и выбирают вариант с римскими обозначениями, его легко найти из предлагаемых.

Как ввести на телефоне?

Андроид (Самсунг и другие).

Андроид – популярнейшая в мире операционная система, так как подходит для большинства смартфонов. Здесь набор римских цифр осуществляется через английскую раскладку. Нажимаем иконку с изображением глобуса, затем зажимаем клавишу Shift для повышения регистра – и можно набирать цифры.

Айфон

Операционная система iOs упрощена до предела, но принцип набора римских символов на клавиатуре айфона тот же. Нажимаем в телефонной клавиатуре  иконку с изображением глобуса, затем зажимаем клавишу Shift для повышения регистра – и можно набирать символы.

Как набрать на планшете (Айпад и др.)?

В англоязычной раскладке устанавливаем написание заглавными буквами через клавишу Shift и набираем буквы на клавиатуре.

Как напечатать в Опен офис?

Принцип аналогичен работе в процессоре Microsoft Word. Здесь можно скопировать буквы из набора в меню или писать вручную буквы английским текстом.

Ручной набор на макбуке или аймаке (MacOS)

Если нажать на клавиатуре Макбука комбинацию Command + Пробел, то можно переключить на английский язык, латиница станет доступной для набора.

Как набрать, используя ASCII-коды?

Это не самый удобный и современный способ набора нужного символа на ПК, но им тоже иногда требуется воспользоваться, когда работаете через комп. Для этой цели потребуется включение дополнительной клавиатуры NumLock. Затем используется параллельное нажатие клавиши Alt и цифр на нумпаде. Как только символ отобразится на экране, клавишу Alt надо отпустить, затем нажать для ввода следующего.

Используются такие комбинации:

Теперь вы знаете, как можно пронумеровать текст разными способами и на разных видах клавиатуры. Пользуйтесь тем, который наиболее удобен, чтобы четко и красиво пронумеровать любой список, проставить исторические даты и элегантно оформить документ в соответствии с нормативами, стандартами и общепринятыми требованиями!

For the Latin script originally used by the ancient Romans to write Latin, see Latin alphabet.

Latin Roman
Script type	Alphabet
Time period	c. 700 BC – present
Direction	left-to-right
Languages	Most Western European languages, including Latin Many Turkic, Finno-Ugric and Eskimo–Aleut languages Basque Some Slavic, African, Austronesian, and Austroasiatic languages Official script in: 132 sovereign states  Albania  Andorra  Angola  Antigua and Barbuda  Argentina  Australia  Austria  Azerbaijan  Bahamas  Barbados  Belgium  Belize  Benin  Bolivia  Botswana  Brazil  Burkina Faso  Burundi  Cameroon  Canada  Cape Verde  Central African Republic  Chile  Colombia  Congo  Democratic Republic of Congo  Costa Rica  Cote D’Ivoire  Croatia  Cuba  Czech Republic  Denmark  Dominica  Dominican Republic  East Timor  Ecuador  El Salvador  Equatorial Guinea  Estonia  Eswatini  Fiji  Finland  France  Gabon  Gambia  Ghana  Germany  Grenada  Guatemala  Guinea  Guinea-Bissau  Guyana  Haiti  Honduras  Hungary  Iceland  Indonesia  Ireland  Italy  Jamaica  Kenya  Kiribati  Latvia  Lesotho  Liberia  Liechtenstein  Lithuania  Luxembourg  Madagascar  Malawi  Malaysia  Mali  Malta  Marshall Islands  Mauritius  Mexico  Micronesia  Moldova  Monaco  Mozambique  Namibia  Nauru  Netherlands  New Zealand  Nicaragua  Niger  Nigeria  Norway  Palau  Panama  Papua New Guinea  Paraguay  Peru  Philippines  Poland  Portugal  Romania  Rwanda  Saint Kitts and Nevis  Saint Lucia  Saint Vincent and the Grenadines  Samoa  San Marino  São Tomé and Príncipe  Senegal  Seychelles  Sierra Leone  Slovakia  Slovenia  Solomon Islands  South Africa  South Sudan  Spain  Suriname  Sweden  Switzerland  Tanzania  Togo  Tonga  Trinidad and Tobago  Turkey  Turkmenistan  Tuvalu  Uganda  United Kingdom  United States  Uruguay  Uzbekistan  Vanuatu   Vatican City  Venezuela  Vietnam  Zambia  Zimbabwe Co-official script in: 15 sovereign states  Bosnia and Herzegovina  Brunei  Chad  Comoros  Djibouti  Eritrea  India  Kazakhstan  Kosovo  Montenegro  Pakistan  Singapore[a]  Somalia  Sudan  European Union  United Nations
Related scripts
Parent systems	Egyptian hieroglyphs Proto-Sinaitic script Phoenician alphabet Greek alphabet Old Italic script Latin
Child systems	Fraser alphabet (Lisu) Cyrillic script Osage script Latin alphabet (partially) several phonetic alphabets, such as IPA, which have been used to write languages with no native script Deseret alphabet (partially) Pollard script (Miao) (partially) Caroline Island script (Woleaian) (indirectly) Cherokee syllabary (indirectly, partially) Yugtun script
Sister systems	Glagolitic script Armenian alphabet Georgian script Coptic alphabet Runes
ISO 15924
ISO 15924	Latn (215), ​Latin
Unicode
Unicode alias	Latin
Unicode range	See Latin characters in Unicode
This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.

The Latin script, also known as Roman script, is an alphabetic writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae, in southern Italy (Magna Grecia). It was adopted by the Etruscans and subsequently by the Romans. Several Latin-script alphabets exist, which differ in graphemes, collation and phonetic values from the classical Latin alphabet.

The Latin script is the basis of the International Phonetic Alphabet, and the 26 most widespread letters are the letters contained in the ISO basic Latin alphabet.

Latin script is the basis for the largest number of alphabets of any writing system^[1] and is the
most widely adopted writing system in the world. Latin script is used as the standard method of writing for most Western and Central, and some Eastern, European languages as well as many languages in other parts of the world.

Name[edit]

The script is either called Latin script or Roman script, in reference to its origin in ancient Rome (though some of the capital letters are Greek in origin). In the context of transliteration, the term «romanization» (British English: «romanisation») is often found.^[2][3] Unicode uses the term «Latin»^[4] as does the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).^[5]

The numeral system is called the Roman numeral system, and the collection of the elements is known as the Roman numerals. The numbers 1, 2, 3 … are Latin/Roman script numbers for the Hindu–Arabic numeral system.

History[edit]

Old Italic alphabet[edit]

Archaic Latin alphabet[edit]

The letter ⟨C⟩ was the western form of the Greek gamma, but it was used for the sounds /ɡ/ and /k/ alike, possibly under the influence of Etruscan, which might have lacked any voiced plosives. Later, probably during the 3rd 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 /ɡ/, 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⟩.

Classical Latin alphabet[edit]

After the Roman conquest of Greece in the 1st century BC, Latin adopted the Greek words ⟨Y⟩ and ⟨Z⟩ (or readopted, in the latter case) to write Greek loanwords, placing them at the end of the alphabet. An attempt by the emperor Claudius to introduce three additional letters did not last. Thus it was during the classical Latin period that the Latin alphabet contained 23 letters:Italic text

Medieval and later developments[edit]

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.^{[citation needed]}

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 & 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.

The languages that use the Latin script generally use capital letters to begin paragraphs and sentences and proper nouns. The rules for capitalization have changed over time, and different languages have varied in their rules for capitalization. Old English, for example, was rarely written with even proper nouns capitalized, whereas Modern English writers and printers of the 17th and 18th century frequently capitalized most and sometimes all nouns^[6] – e.g. in the preamble and all of the United States Constitution – a practice still systematically used in Modern German.

ISO basic Latin alphabet[edit]

The use of the letters I and V for both consonants and vowels proved inconvenient as the Latin alphabet was adapted to Germanic and Romance languages. W originated as a doubled V (VV) used to represent the Voiced labial–velar approximant /w/ found in Old English as early as the 7th century. It came into common use in the later 11th century, replacing the letter wynn ⟨Ƿ ƿ⟩, which had been used for the same sound. In the Romance languages, the minuscule form of V was a rounded u; from this was derived a rounded capital U for the vowel in the 16th century, while a new, pointed minuscule v was derived from V for the consonant. In the case of I, a word-final swash form, j, came to be used for the consonant, with the un-swashed form restricted to vowel use. Such conventions were erratic for centuries. J was introduced into English for the consonant in the 17th century (it had been rare as a vowel), but it was not universally considered a distinct letter in the alphabetic order until the 19th century.

By the 1960s, it became apparent to the computer and telecommunications industries in the First World that a non-proprietary method of encoding characters was needed. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) encapsulated the Latin alphabet in their (ISO/IEC 646) standard. To achieve widespread acceptance, this encapsulation was based on popular usage. As the United States held a preeminent position in both industries during the 1960s, the standard was based on the already published American Standard Code for Information Interchange, better known as ASCII, which included in the character set the 26 × 2 (uppercase and lowercase) letters of the English alphabet. Later standards issued by the ISO, for example ISO/IEC 10646 (Unicode Latin), have continued to define the 26 × 2 letters of the English alphabet as the basic Latin alphabet with extensions to handle other letters in other languages.

Spread[edit]

The Latin alphabet spread, along with Latin, 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, Turkey, the Levant, and Egypt, continued to use Greek as a lingua franca, 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.

Middle Ages[edit]

With the spread of Western Christianity during the Middle Ages, the Latin alphabet was gradually adopted by the peoples of Northern Europe who spoke Celtic languages (displacing the Ogham alphabet) or Germanic languages (displacing earlier Runic alphabets) or Baltic languages, as well as by the speakers of several Uralic languages, most notably Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian.

The Latin script also came into use for writing the West Slavic languages and several South Slavic languages, as the people who spoke them adopted Roman Catholicism. The speakers of East Slavic languages generally adopted Cyrillic along with Orthodox Christianity. The Serbian language uses both scripts, with Cyrillic predominating in official communication and Latin elsewhere, as determined by the Law on Official Use of the Language and Alphabet.^[7]

Since the 16th century[edit]

As late as 1500, the Latin script was limited primarily to the languages spoken in Western, Northern, and Central Europe. The Orthodox Christian Slavs of Eastern and Southeastern Europe mostly used Cyrillic, and the Greek alphabet was in use by Greek-speakers around the eastern Mediterranean. The Arabic script was widespread within Islam, both among Arabs and non-Arab nations like the Iranians, Indonesians, Malays, and Turkic peoples. Most of the rest of Asia used a variety of Brahmic alphabets or the Chinese script.

Through European colonization the Latin script has spread to the Americas, Oceania, parts of Asia, Africa, and the Pacific, in forms based on the Spanish, Portuguese, English, French, German and Dutch alphabets.

It is used for many Austronesian languages, including the languages of the Philippines and the Malaysian and Indonesian languages, replacing earlier Arabic and indigenous Brahmic alphabets. Latin letters served as the basis for the forms of the Cherokee syllabary developed by Sequoyah; however, the sound values are completely different.^{[citation needed]}

Under Portuguese missionary influence, a Latin alphabet was devised for the Vietnamese language, which had previously used Chinese characters. The Latin-based alphabet replaced the Chinese characters in administration in the 19th century with French rule.

Since 19th century[edit]

In the late 19th century, the Romanians switched to the Latin alphabet, which they had used until the Council of Florence in 1439,^[8] primarily because Romanian is a Romance language. The Romanians were predominantly Orthodox Christians, and their Church, increasingly influenced by Russia after the fall of Byzantine Greek Constantinople in 1453 and capture of the Greek Orthodox Patriarch, had begun promoting the Slavic Cyrillic.

Since 20th century[edit]

In 1928, as part of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s reforms, the new Republic of Turkey adopted a Latin alphabet for the Turkish language, replacing a modified Arabic alphabet. Most of the Turkic-speaking peoples of the former USSR, including Tatars, Bashkirs, Azeri, Kazakh, Kyrgyz and others, had their writing systems replaced by the Latin-based Uniform Turkic alphabet in the 1930s; but, in the 1940s, all were replaced by Cyrillic.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, three of the newly independent Turkic-speaking republics, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, as well as Romanian-speaking Moldova, officially adopted Latin alphabets for their languages. Kyrgyzstan, Iranian-speaking Tajikistan, and the breakaway region of Transnistria kept the Cyrillic alphabet, chiefly due to their close ties with Russia.

In the 1930s and 1940s, the majority of Kurds replaced the Arabic script with two Latin alphabets. Although only the official Kurdish government uses an Arabic alphabet for public documents, the Latin Kurdish alphabet remains widely used throughout the region by the majority of Kurdish-speakers.

In 1957, the People’s Republic of China introduced a script reform to the Zhuang language, changing its orthography from Sawndip, a writing system based on Chinese, to a Latin script alphabet that used a mixture of Latin, Cyrillic, and IPA letters to represent both the phonemes and tones of the Zhuang language, without the use of diacritics. In 1982 this was further standardised to use only Latin script letters.

With the collapse of the Derg and subsequent end of decades of Amharic assimilation in 1991, various ethnic groups in Ethiopia dropped the Geʽez script, which was deemed unsuitable for languages outside of the Semitic branch.^[9] In the following years the Kafa,^[10] Oromo,^[11] Sidama,^[12] Somali,^[12] and Wolaitta^[12] languages switched to Latin while there is continued debate on whether to follow suit for the Hadiyya and Kambaata languages.^[13]

21st century[edit]

On 15 September 1999 the authorities of Tatarstan, Russia, passed a law to make the Latin script a co-official writing system alongside Cyrillic for the Tatar language by 2011.^[14] A year later, however, the Russian government overruled the law and banned Latinization on its territory.^[15]

In 2015, the government of Kazakhstan announced that a Kazakh Latin alphabet would replace the Kazakh Cyrillic alphabet as the official writing system for the Kazakh language by 2025.^[16] There are also talks about switching from the Cyrillic script to Latin in Ukraine,^[17] Kyrgyzstan,^[18][19] and Mongolia.^[20] Mongolia, however, has since opted to revive the Mongolian script instead of switching to Latin.^[21]

In October 2019, the organization National Representational Organization for Inuit in Canada (ITK) announced that they will introduce a unified writing system for the Inuit languages in the country. The writing system is based on the Latin alphabet and is modeled after the one used in the Greenlandic language.^[22]

On 12 February 2021 the government of Uzbekistan announced it will finalize the transition from Cyrillic to Latin for the Uzbek language by 2023. Plans to switch to Latin originally began in 1993 but subsequently stalled and Cyrillic remained in widespread use.^[23][24]

At present the Crimean Tatar language uses both Cyrillic and Latin. The use of Latin was originally approved by Crimean Tatar representatives after the Soviet Union’s collapse^[25] but was never implemented by the regional government. After Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 the Latin script was dropped entirely. Nevertheless Crimean Tatars outside of Crimea continue to use Latin and on 22 October 2021 the government of Ukraine approved a proposal endorsed by the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People to switch the Crimean Tatar language to Latin by 2025.^[26]

In July 2020, 2.6 billion people (36% of the world population) use the Latin alphabet.^[27]

International standards[edit]

By the 1960s, it became apparent to the computer and telecommunications industries in the First World that a non-proprietary method of encoding characters was needed. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) encapsulated the Latin alphabet in their (ISO/IEC 646) standard. To achieve widespread acceptance, this encapsulation was based on popular usage.

As the United States held a preeminent position in both industries during the 1960s, the standard was based on the already published American Standard Code for Information Interchange, better known as ASCII, which included in the character set the 26 × 2 (uppercase and lowercase) letters of the English alphabet. Later standards issued by the ISO, for example ISO/IEC 10646 (Unicode Latin), have continued to define the 26 × 2 letters of the English alphabet as the basic Latin alphabet with extensions to handle other letters in other languages.

National standards[edit]

The DIN standard DIN 91379 specifies a subset of Unicode letters, special characters, and sequences of letters and diacritic signs to allow the correct representation of names and to simplify data exchange in Europe. This specification supports all official languages of European Union countries (thus also Greek and Cyrillic for Bulgarian) as well as the official languages of Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland, and also the German minority languages. To allow the transliteration of names in other writing systems to the Latin script according to the relevant ISO standards all necessary combinations of base letters and diacritic signs are provided.^[28]
Efforts are being made to further develop it into a European CEN standard.^[29]

As used by various languages[edit]

In the course of its use, the Latin alphabet was adapted for use in new languages, sometimes representing phonemes not found in languages that were already written with the Roman characters. To represent these new sounds, extensions were therefore created, be it by adding diacritics to existing letters, by joining multiple letters together to make ligatures, by creating completely new forms, or by assigning a special function to pairs or triplets of letters. These new forms are given a place in the alphabet by defining an alphabetical order or collation sequence, which can vary with the particular language.

Letters[edit]

Some examples of new letters to the standard Latin alphabet are the Runic letters wynn ⟨Ƿ ƿ⟩ and thorn ⟨Þ þ⟩, and the letter eth ⟨Ð/ð⟩, which were added to the alphabet of Old English. Another Irish letter, the insular g, developed into yogh ⟨Ȝ ȝ⟩, used in Middle English. Wynn was later replaced with the new letter ⟨w⟩, eth and thorn with ⟨th⟩, and yogh with ⟨gh⟩. Although the four are no longer part of the English or Irish alphabets, eth and thorn are still used in the modern Icelandic alphabet, while eth is also used by the Faroese alphabet.

Some West, Central and Southern African languages use a few additional letters that have sound values similar to those of their equivalents in the IPA. For example, Adangme uses the letters ⟨Ɛ ɛ⟩ and ⟨Ɔ ɔ⟩, and Ga uses ⟨Ɛ ɛ⟩, ⟨Ŋ ŋ⟩ and ⟨Ɔ ɔ⟩. Hausa uses ⟨Ɓ ɓ⟩ and ⟨Ɗ ɗ⟩ for implosives, and ⟨Ƙ ƙ⟩ for an ejective. Africanists have standardized these into the African reference alphabet.

Dotted and dotless I — ⟨İ i⟩ and ⟨I ı⟩ — are two forms of the letter I used by the Turkish, Azerbaijani, and Kazakh alphabets.^[30] The Azerbaijani language also has ⟨Ə ə⟩, which represents the near-open front unrounded vowel.

Multigraphs[edit]

A digraph is a pair of letters used to write one sound or a combination of sounds that does not correspond to the written letters in sequence. Examples are ⟨ch⟩, ⟨ng⟩, ⟨rh⟩, ⟨sh⟩, ⟨ph⟩, ⟨th⟩ in English, and ⟨ij⟩, ⟨ee⟩, ⟨ch⟩ and ⟨ei⟩ in Dutch. In Dutch the ⟨ij⟩ is capitalized as ⟨IJ⟩ or the ligature ⟨IJ⟩, but never as ⟨Ij⟩, and it often takes the appearance of a ligature ⟨ij⟩ very similar to the letter ⟨ÿ⟩ in handwriting.

A trigraph is made up of three letters, like the German ⟨sch⟩, the Breton ⟨c’h⟩ or the Milanese ⟨oeu⟩. In the orthographies of some languages, digraphs and trigraphs are regarded as independent letters of the alphabet in their own right. The capitalization of digraphs and trigraphs is language-dependent, as only the first letter may be capitalized, or all component letters simultaneously (even for words written in title case, where letters after the digraph or trigraph are left in lowercase).

Ligatures[edit]

A ligature is a fusion of two or more ordinary letters into a new glyph or character. Examples are ⟨Æ æ⟩ (from ⟨AE⟩, called «ash»), ⟨Œ œ⟩ (from ⟨OE⟩, sometimes called «oethel»), the abbreviation ⟨&⟩ (from Latin: et, lit. ‘and’, called «ampersand»), and ⟨ẞ ß⟩ (from ⟨ſʒ⟩ or ⟨ſs⟩, the archaic medial form of ⟨s⟩, followed by an ⟨ʒ⟩ or ⟨s⟩, called «sharp S» or «eszett»).

Diacritics[edit]

A diacritic, in some cases also called an accent, is a small symbol that can appear above or below a letter, or in some other position, such as the umlaut sign used in the German characters ⟨ä⟩, ⟨ö⟩, ⟨ü⟩ or the Romanian characters ă, â, î, ș, ț. Its main function is to change the phonetic value of the letter to which it is added, but it may also modify the pronunciation of a whole syllable or word, indicate the start of a new syllable, or distinguish between homographs such as the Dutch words een (pronounced [ən]) meaning «a» or «an», and één, (pronounced [e:n]) meaning «one». As with the pronunciation of letters, the effect of diacritics is language-dependent.

English is the only major modern European language that requires no diacritics for its native vocabulary^{[note 1]}. Historically, in formal writing, a diaeresis was sometimes used to indicate the start of a new syllable within a sequence of letters that could otherwise be misinterpreted as being a single vowel (e.g., “coöperative”, “reëlect”), but modern writing styles either omit such marks or use a hyphen to indicate a syllable break (e.g. “cooperative”, “re-elect”). ^{[note 2][31]}

Collation[edit]

Some modified letters, such as the symbols ⟨å⟩, ⟨ä⟩, and ⟨ö⟩, may be regarded as new individual letters in themselves, and assigned a specific place in the alphabet for collation purposes, separate from that of the letter on which they are based, as is done in Swedish. In other cases, such as with ⟨ä⟩, ⟨ö⟩, ⟨ü⟩ in German, this is not done; letter-diacritic combinations being identified with their base letter. The same applies to digraphs and trigraphs. Different diacritics may be treated differently in collation within a single language. For example, in Spanish, the character ⟨ñ⟩ is considered a letter, and sorted between ⟨n⟩ and ⟨o⟩ in dictionaries, but the accented vowels ⟨á⟩, ⟨é⟩, ⟨í⟩, ⟨ó⟩, ⟨ú⟩, ⟨ü⟩ are not separated from the unaccented vowels ⟨a⟩, ⟨e⟩, ⟨i⟩, ⟨o⟩, ⟨u⟩.

Capitalization[edit]

The languages that use the Latin script today generally use capital letters to begin paragraphs and sentences and proper nouns. The rules for capitalization have changed over time, and different languages have varied in their rules for capitalization. Old English, for example, was rarely written with even proper nouns capitalized; whereas Modern English of the 18th century had frequently all nouns capitalized, in the same way that Modern German is written today, e.g. German: Alle Schwestern der alten Stadt hatten die Vögel gesehen, lit. ‘All of the sisters of the old city had seen the birds’.

Romanization[edit]

Words from languages natively written with other scripts, such as Arabic or Chinese, are usually transliterated or transcribed when embedded in Latin-script text or in multilingual international communication, a process termed Romanization.

Whilst the Romanization of such languages is used mostly at unofficial levels, it has been especially prominent in computer messaging where only the limited seven-bit ASCII code is available on older systems. However, with the introduction of Unicode, Romanization is now becoming less necessary. Note that keyboards used to enter such text may still restrict users to Romanized text, as only ASCII or Latin-alphabet characters may be available.

See also[edit]

• List of languages by writing system#Latin script
• Western Latin character sets (computing)
• European Latin Unicode subset (DIN 91379)
• Latin letters used in mathematics
• Latin omega

Notes[edit]

References[edit]

Citations[edit]

Sources[edit]

Further reading[edit]

• Boyle, Leonard E. 1976. «Optimist and recensionist: ‘Common errors’ or ‘common variations.'» In Latin script and letters A.D. 400–900: Festschrift presented to Ludwig Bieler on the occasion of his 70th birthday. Edited by John J. O’Meara and Bernd Naumann, 264–74. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill.
• Morison, Stanley. 1972. Politics and script: Aspects of authority and freedom in the development of Graeco-Latin script from the sixth century B.C. to the twentieth century A.D. Oxford: Clarendon.

External links[edit]

• Unicode collation chart—Latin letters sorted by shape
• Diacritics Project – All you need to design a font with correct accents

For the Latin script originally used by the ancient Romans to write Latin, see Latin alphabet.

Latin Roman
Script type	Alphabet
Time period	c. 700 BC – present
Direction	left-to-right
Languages	Most Western European languages, including Latin Many Turkic, Finno-Ugric and Eskimo–Aleut languages Basque Some Slavic, African, Austronesian, and Austroasiatic languages Official script in: 132 sovereign states  Albania  Andorra  Angola  Antigua and Barbuda  Argentina  Australia  Austria  Azerbaijan  Bahamas  Barbados  Belgium  Belize  Benin  Bolivia  Botswana  Brazil  Burkina Faso  Burundi  Cameroon  Canada  Cape Verde  Central African Republic  Chile  Colombia  Congo  Democratic Republic of Congo  Costa Rica  Cote D’Ivoire  Croatia  Cuba  Czech Republic  Denmark  Dominica  Dominican Republic  East Timor  Ecuador  El Salvador  Equatorial Guinea  Estonia  Eswatini  Fiji  Finland  France  Gabon  Gambia  Ghana  Germany  Grenada  Guatemala  Guinea  Guinea-Bissau  Guyana  Haiti  Honduras  Hungary  Iceland  Indonesia  Ireland  Italy  Jamaica  Kenya  Kiribati  Latvia  Lesotho  Liberia  Liechtenstein  Lithuania  Luxembourg  Madagascar  Malawi  Malaysia  Mali  Malta  Marshall Islands  Mauritius  Mexico  Micronesia  Moldova  Monaco  Mozambique  Namibia  Nauru  Netherlands  New Zealand  Nicaragua  Niger  Nigeria  Norway  Palau  Panama  Papua New Guinea  Paraguay  Peru  Philippines  Poland  Portugal  Romania  Rwanda  Saint Kitts and Nevis  Saint Lucia  Saint Vincent and the Grenadines  Samoa  San Marino  São Tomé and Príncipe  Senegal  Seychelles  Sierra Leone  Slovakia  Slovenia  Solomon Islands  South Africa  South Sudan  Spain  Suriname  Sweden  Switzerland  Tanzania  Togo  Tonga  Trinidad and Tobago  Turkey  Turkmenistan  Tuvalu  Uganda  United Kingdom  United States  Uruguay  Uzbekistan  Vanuatu   Vatican City  Venezuela  Vietnam  Zambia  Zimbabwe Co-official script in: 15 sovereign states  Bosnia and Herzegovina  Brunei  Chad  Comoros  Djibouti  Eritrea  India  Kazakhstan  Kosovo  Montenegro  Pakistan  Singapore[a]  Somalia  Sudan  European Union  United Nations
Related scripts
Parent systems	Egyptian hieroglyphs Proto-Sinaitic script Phoenician alphabet Greek alphabet Old Italic script Latin
Child systems	Fraser alphabet (Lisu) Cyrillic script Osage script Latin alphabet (partially) several phonetic alphabets, such as IPA, which have been used to write languages with no native script Deseret alphabet (partially) Pollard script (Miao) (partially) Caroline Island script (Woleaian) (indirectly) Cherokee syllabary (indirectly, partially) Yugtun script
Sister systems	Glagolitic script Armenian alphabet Georgian script Coptic alphabet Runes
ISO 15924
ISO 15924	Latn (215), ​Latin
Unicode
Unicode alias	Latin
Unicode range	See Latin characters in Unicode
This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.

The Latin script, also known as Roman script, is an alphabetic writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae, in southern Italy (Magna Grecia). It was adopted by the Etruscans and subsequently by the Romans. Several Latin-script alphabets exist, which differ in graphemes, collation and phonetic values from the classical Latin alphabet.

The Latin script is the basis of the International Phonetic Alphabet, and the 26 most widespread letters are the letters contained in the ISO basic Latin alphabet.

Latin script is the basis for the largest number of alphabets of any writing system^[1] and is the
most widely adopted writing system in the world. Latin script is used as the standard method of writing for most Western and Central, and some Eastern, European languages as well as many languages in other parts of the world.

Name[edit]

The script is either called Latin script or Roman script, in reference to its origin in ancient Rome (though some of the capital letters are Greek in origin). In the context of transliteration, the term «romanization» (British English: «romanisation») is often found.^[2][3] Unicode uses the term «Latin»^[4] as does the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).^[5]

The numeral system is called the Roman numeral system, and the collection of the elements is known as the Roman numerals. The numbers 1, 2, 3 … are Latin/Roman script numbers for the Hindu–Arabic numeral system.

History[edit]

Old Italic alphabet[edit]

Archaic Latin alphabet[edit]

The letter ⟨C⟩ was the western form of the Greek gamma, but it was used for the sounds /ɡ/ and /k/ alike, possibly under the influence of Etruscan, which might have lacked any voiced plosives. Later, probably during the 3rd 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 /ɡ/, 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⟩.

Classical Latin alphabet[edit]

After the Roman conquest of Greece in the 1st century BC, Latin adopted the Greek words ⟨Y⟩ and ⟨Z⟩ (or readopted, in the latter case) to write Greek loanwords, placing them at the end of the alphabet. An attempt by the emperor Claudius to introduce three additional letters did not last. Thus it was during the classical Latin period that the Latin alphabet contained 23 letters:Italic text

Medieval and later developments[edit]

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.^{[citation needed]}

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 & 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.

The languages that use the Latin script generally use capital letters to begin paragraphs and sentences and proper nouns. The rules for capitalization have changed over time, and different languages have varied in their rules for capitalization. Old English, for example, was rarely written with even proper nouns capitalized, whereas Modern English writers and printers of the 17th and 18th century frequently capitalized most and sometimes all nouns^[6] – e.g. in the preamble and all of the United States Constitution – a practice still systematically used in Modern German.

ISO basic Latin alphabet[edit]

The use of the letters I and V for both consonants and vowels proved inconvenient as the Latin alphabet was adapted to Germanic and Romance languages. W originated as a doubled V (VV) used to represent the Voiced labial–velar approximant /w/ found in Old English as early as the 7th century. It came into common use in the later 11th century, replacing the letter wynn ⟨Ƿ ƿ⟩, which had been used for the same sound. In the Romance languages, the minuscule form of V was a rounded u; from this was derived a rounded capital U for the vowel in the 16th century, while a new, pointed minuscule v was derived from V for the consonant. In the case of I, a word-final swash form, j, came to be used for the consonant, with the un-swashed form restricted to vowel use. Such conventions were erratic for centuries. J was introduced into English for the consonant in the 17th century (it had been rare as a vowel), but it was not universally considered a distinct letter in the alphabetic order until the 19th century.

By the 1960s, it became apparent to the computer and telecommunications industries in the First World that a non-proprietary method of encoding characters was needed. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) encapsulated the Latin alphabet in their (ISO/IEC 646) standard. To achieve widespread acceptance, this encapsulation was based on popular usage. As the United States held a preeminent position in both industries during the 1960s, the standard was based on the already published American Standard Code for Information Interchange, better known as ASCII, which included in the character set the 26 × 2 (uppercase and lowercase) letters of the English alphabet. Later standards issued by the ISO, for example ISO/IEC 10646 (Unicode Latin), have continued to define the 26 × 2 letters of the English alphabet as the basic Latin alphabet with extensions to handle other letters in other languages.

Spread[edit]

The Latin alphabet spread, along with Latin, 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, Turkey, the Levant, and Egypt, continued to use Greek as a lingua franca, 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.

Middle Ages[edit]

With the spread of Western Christianity during the Middle Ages, the Latin alphabet was gradually adopted by the peoples of Northern Europe who spoke Celtic languages (displacing the Ogham alphabet) or Germanic languages (displacing earlier Runic alphabets) or Baltic languages, as well as by the speakers of several Uralic languages, most notably Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian.

The Latin script also came into use for writing the West Slavic languages and several South Slavic languages, as the people who spoke them adopted Roman Catholicism. The speakers of East Slavic languages generally adopted Cyrillic along with Orthodox Christianity. The Serbian language uses both scripts, with Cyrillic predominating in official communication and Latin elsewhere, as determined by the Law on Official Use of the Language and Alphabet.^[7]

Since the 16th century[edit]

As late as 1500, the Latin script was limited primarily to the languages spoken in Western, Northern, and Central Europe. The Orthodox Christian Slavs of Eastern and Southeastern Europe mostly used Cyrillic, and the Greek alphabet was in use by Greek-speakers around the eastern Mediterranean. The Arabic script was widespread within Islam, both among Arabs and non-Arab nations like the Iranians, Indonesians, Malays, and Turkic peoples. Most of the rest of Asia used a variety of Brahmic alphabets or the Chinese script.

Through European colonization the Latin script has spread to the Americas, Oceania, parts of Asia, Africa, and the Pacific, in forms based on the Spanish, Portuguese, English, French, German and Dutch alphabets.

It is used for many Austronesian languages, including the languages of the Philippines and the Malaysian and Indonesian languages, replacing earlier Arabic and indigenous Brahmic alphabets. Latin letters served as the basis for the forms of the Cherokee syllabary developed by Sequoyah; however, the sound values are completely different.^{[citation needed]}

Under Portuguese missionary influence, a Latin alphabet was devised for the Vietnamese language, which had previously used Chinese characters. The Latin-based alphabet replaced the Chinese characters in administration in the 19th century with French rule.

Since 19th century[edit]

In the late 19th century, the Romanians switched to the Latin alphabet, which they had used until the Council of Florence in 1439,^[8] primarily because Romanian is a Romance language. The Romanians were predominantly Orthodox Christians, and their Church, increasingly influenced by Russia after the fall of Byzantine Greek Constantinople in 1453 and capture of the Greek Orthodox Patriarch, had begun promoting the Slavic Cyrillic.

Since 20th century[edit]

In 1928, as part of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s reforms, the new Republic of Turkey adopted a Latin alphabet for the Turkish language, replacing a modified Arabic alphabet. Most of the Turkic-speaking peoples of the former USSR, including Tatars, Bashkirs, Azeri, Kazakh, Kyrgyz and others, had their writing systems replaced by the Latin-based Uniform Turkic alphabet in the 1930s; but, in the 1940s, all were replaced by Cyrillic.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, three of the newly independent Turkic-speaking republics, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, as well as Romanian-speaking Moldova, officially adopted Latin alphabets for their languages. Kyrgyzstan, Iranian-speaking Tajikistan, and the breakaway region of Transnistria kept the Cyrillic alphabet, chiefly due to their close ties with Russia.

In the 1930s and 1940s, the majority of Kurds replaced the Arabic script with two Latin alphabets. Although only the official Kurdish government uses an Arabic alphabet for public documents, the Latin Kurdish alphabet remains widely used throughout the region by the majority of Kurdish-speakers.

In 1957, the People’s Republic of China introduced a script reform to the Zhuang language, changing its orthography from Sawndip, a writing system based on Chinese, to a Latin script alphabet that used a mixture of Latin, Cyrillic, and IPA letters to represent both the phonemes and tones of the Zhuang language, without the use of diacritics. In 1982 this was further standardised to use only Latin script letters.

With the collapse of the Derg and subsequent end of decades of Amharic assimilation in 1991, various ethnic groups in Ethiopia dropped the Geʽez script, which was deemed unsuitable for languages outside of the Semitic branch.^[9] In the following years the Kafa,^[10] Oromo,^[11] Sidama,^[12] Somali,^[12] and Wolaitta^[12] languages switched to Latin while there is continued debate on whether to follow suit for the Hadiyya and Kambaata languages.^[13]

21st century[edit]

On 15 September 1999 the authorities of Tatarstan, Russia, passed a law to make the Latin script a co-official writing system alongside Cyrillic for the Tatar language by 2011.^[14] A year later, however, the Russian government overruled the law and banned Latinization on its territory.^[15]

In 2015, the government of Kazakhstan announced that a Kazakh Latin alphabet would replace the Kazakh Cyrillic alphabet as the official writing system for the Kazakh language by 2025.^[16] There are also talks about switching from the Cyrillic script to Latin in Ukraine,^[17] Kyrgyzstan,^[18][19] and Mongolia.^[20] Mongolia, however, has since opted to revive the Mongolian script instead of switching to Latin.^[21]

In October 2019, the organization National Representational Organization for Inuit in Canada (ITK) announced that they will introduce a unified writing system for the Inuit languages in the country. The writing system is based on the Latin alphabet and is modeled after the one used in the Greenlandic language.^[22]

On 12 February 2021 the government of Uzbekistan announced it will finalize the transition from Cyrillic to Latin for the Uzbek language by 2023. Plans to switch to Latin originally began in 1993 but subsequently stalled and Cyrillic remained in widespread use.^[23][24]

At present the Crimean Tatar language uses both Cyrillic and Latin. The use of Latin was originally approved by Crimean Tatar representatives after the Soviet Union’s collapse^[25] but was never implemented by the regional government. After Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 the Latin script was dropped entirely. Nevertheless Crimean Tatars outside of Crimea continue to use Latin and on 22 October 2021 the government of Ukraine approved a proposal endorsed by the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People to switch the Crimean Tatar language to Latin by 2025.^[26]

In July 2020, 2.6 billion people (36% of the world population) use the Latin alphabet.^[27]

International standards[edit]

By the 1960s, it became apparent to the computer and telecommunications industries in the First World that a non-proprietary method of encoding characters was needed. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) encapsulated the Latin alphabet in their (ISO/IEC 646) standard. To achieve widespread acceptance, this encapsulation was based on popular usage.

As the United States held a preeminent position in both industries during the 1960s, the standard was based on the already published American Standard Code for Information Interchange, better known as ASCII, which included in the character set the 26 × 2 (uppercase and lowercase) letters of the English alphabet. Later standards issued by the ISO, for example ISO/IEC 10646 (Unicode Latin), have continued to define the 26 × 2 letters of the English alphabet as the basic Latin alphabet with extensions to handle other letters in other languages.

National standards[edit]

The DIN standard DIN 91379 specifies a subset of Unicode letters, special characters, and sequences of letters and diacritic signs to allow the correct representation of names and to simplify data exchange in Europe. This specification supports all official languages of European Union countries (thus also Greek and Cyrillic for Bulgarian) as well as the official languages of Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland, and also the German minority languages. To allow the transliteration of names in other writing systems to the Latin script according to the relevant ISO standards all necessary combinations of base letters and diacritic signs are provided.^[28]
Efforts are being made to further develop it into a European CEN standard.^[29]

As used by various languages[edit]

In the course of its use, the Latin alphabet was adapted for use in new languages, sometimes representing phonemes not found in languages that were already written with the Roman characters. To represent these new sounds, extensions were therefore created, be it by adding diacritics to existing letters, by joining multiple letters together to make ligatures, by creating completely new forms, or by assigning a special function to pairs or triplets of letters. These new forms are given a place in the alphabet by defining an alphabetical order or collation sequence, which can vary with the particular language.

Letters[edit]

Some examples of new letters to the standard Latin alphabet are the Runic letters wynn ⟨Ƿ ƿ⟩ and thorn ⟨Þ þ⟩, and the letter eth ⟨Ð/ð⟩, which were added to the alphabet of Old English. Another Irish letter, the insular g, developed into yogh ⟨Ȝ ȝ⟩, used in Middle English. Wynn was later replaced with the new letter ⟨w⟩, eth and thorn with ⟨th⟩, and yogh with ⟨gh⟩. Although the four are no longer part of the English or Irish alphabets, eth and thorn are still used in the modern Icelandic alphabet, while eth is also used by the Faroese alphabet.

Some West, Central and Southern African languages use a few additional letters that have sound values similar to those of their equivalents in the IPA. For example, Adangme uses the letters ⟨Ɛ ɛ⟩ and ⟨Ɔ ɔ⟩, and Ga uses ⟨Ɛ ɛ⟩, ⟨Ŋ ŋ⟩ and ⟨Ɔ ɔ⟩. Hausa uses ⟨Ɓ ɓ⟩ and ⟨Ɗ ɗ⟩ for implosives, and ⟨Ƙ ƙ⟩ for an ejective. Africanists have standardized these into the African reference alphabet.

Dotted and dotless I — ⟨İ i⟩ and ⟨I ı⟩ — are two forms of the letter I used by the Turkish, Azerbaijani, and Kazakh alphabets.^[30] The Azerbaijani language also has ⟨Ə ə⟩, which represents the near-open front unrounded vowel.

Multigraphs[edit]

A digraph is a pair of letters used to write one sound or a combination of sounds that does not correspond to the written letters in sequence. Examples are ⟨ch⟩, ⟨ng⟩, ⟨rh⟩, ⟨sh⟩, ⟨ph⟩, ⟨th⟩ in English, and ⟨ij⟩, ⟨ee⟩, ⟨ch⟩ and ⟨ei⟩ in Dutch. In Dutch the ⟨ij⟩ is capitalized as ⟨IJ⟩ or the ligature ⟨IJ⟩, but never as ⟨Ij⟩, and it often takes the appearance of a ligature ⟨ij⟩ very similar to the letter ⟨ÿ⟩ in handwriting.

A trigraph is made up of three letters, like the German ⟨sch⟩, the Breton ⟨c’h⟩ or the Milanese ⟨oeu⟩. In the orthographies of some languages, digraphs and trigraphs are regarded as independent letters of the alphabet in their own right. The capitalization of digraphs and trigraphs is language-dependent, as only the first letter may be capitalized, or all component letters simultaneously (even for words written in title case, where letters after the digraph or trigraph are left in lowercase).

Ligatures[edit]

A ligature is a fusion of two or more ordinary letters into a new glyph or character. Examples are ⟨Æ æ⟩ (from ⟨AE⟩, called «ash»), ⟨Œ œ⟩ (from ⟨OE⟩, sometimes called «oethel»), the abbreviation ⟨&⟩ (from Latin: et, lit. ‘and’, called «ampersand»), and ⟨ẞ ß⟩ (from ⟨ſʒ⟩ or ⟨ſs⟩, the archaic medial form of ⟨s⟩, followed by an ⟨ʒ⟩ or ⟨s⟩, called «sharp S» or «eszett»).

Diacritics[edit]

A diacritic, in some cases also called an accent, is a small symbol that can appear above or below a letter, or in some other position, such as the umlaut sign used in the German characters ⟨ä⟩, ⟨ö⟩, ⟨ü⟩ or the Romanian characters ă, â, î, ș, ț. Its main function is to change the phonetic value of the letter to which it is added, but it may also modify the pronunciation of a whole syllable or word, indicate the start of a new syllable, or distinguish between homographs such as the Dutch words een (pronounced [ən]) meaning «a» or «an», and één, (pronounced [e:n]) meaning «one». As with the pronunciation of letters, the effect of diacritics is language-dependent.

English is the only major modern European language that requires no diacritics for its native vocabulary^{[note 1]}. Historically, in formal writing, a diaeresis was sometimes used to indicate the start of a new syllable within a sequence of letters that could otherwise be misinterpreted as being a single vowel (e.g., “coöperative”, “reëlect”), but modern writing styles either omit such marks or use a hyphen to indicate a syllable break (e.g. “cooperative”, “re-elect”). ^{[note 2][31]}

Collation[edit]

Some modified letters, such as the symbols ⟨å⟩, ⟨ä⟩, and ⟨ö⟩, may be regarded as new individual letters in themselves, and assigned a specific place in the alphabet for collation purposes, separate from that of the letter on which they are based, as is done in Swedish. In other cases, such as with ⟨ä⟩, ⟨ö⟩, ⟨ü⟩ in German, this is not done; letter-diacritic combinations being identified with their base letter. The same applies to digraphs and trigraphs. Different diacritics may be treated differently in collation within a single language. For example, in Spanish, the character ⟨ñ⟩ is considered a letter, and sorted between ⟨n⟩ and ⟨o⟩ in dictionaries, but the accented vowels ⟨á⟩, ⟨é⟩, ⟨í⟩, ⟨ó⟩, ⟨ú⟩, ⟨ü⟩ are not separated from the unaccented vowels ⟨a⟩, ⟨e⟩, ⟨i⟩, ⟨o⟩, ⟨u⟩.

Capitalization[edit]

The languages that use the Latin script today generally use capital letters to begin paragraphs and sentences and proper nouns. The rules for capitalization have changed over time, and different languages have varied in their rules for capitalization. Old English, for example, was rarely written with even proper nouns capitalized; whereas Modern English of the 18th century had frequently all nouns capitalized, in the same way that Modern German is written today, e.g. German: Alle Schwestern der alten Stadt hatten die Vögel gesehen, lit. ‘All of the sisters of the old city had seen the birds’.

Romanization[edit]

Words from languages natively written with other scripts, such as Arabic or Chinese, are usually transliterated or transcribed when embedded in Latin-script text or in multilingual international communication, a process termed Romanization.

Whilst the Romanization of such languages is used mostly at unofficial levels, it has been especially prominent in computer messaging where only the limited seven-bit ASCII code is available on older systems. However, with the introduction of Unicode, Romanization is now becoming less necessary. Note that keyboards used to enter such text may still restrict users to Romanized text, as only ASCII or Latin-alphabet characters may be available.

See also[edit]

• List of languages by writing system#Latin script
• Western Latin character sets (computing)
• European Latin Unicode subset (DIN 91379)
• Latin letters used in mathematics
• Latin omega

Notes[edit]

References[edit]

Citations[edit]

Sources[edit]

Further reading[edit]

• Boyle, Leonard E. 1976. «Optimist and recensionist: ‘Common errors’ or ‘common variations.'» In Latin script and letters A.D. 400–900: Festschrift presented to Ludwig Bieler on the occasion of his 70th birthday. Edited by John J. O’Meara and Bernd Naumann, 264–74. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill.
• Morison, Stanley. 1972. Politics and script: Aspects of authority and freedom in the development of Graeco-Latin script from the sixth century B.C. to the twentieth century A.D. Oxford: Clarendon.

External links[edit]

• Unicode collation chart—Latin letters sorted by shape
• Diacritics Project – All you need to design a font with correct accents

В процессе работы с текстовым редактором Microsoft Word пользователям приходится сталкиваться с разнообразными заданиями и трудностями. Некоторые из них могут быть достаточно банальными. Довольно часто пользователи интересуются, как поставить римские цифры в Word. Этому вопросу и посвящена данная статья. Давайте разбираться. Поехали!

Римские буквы на латинской раскладке

Чтобы написать римские цифры, можно использовать сразу 7 латинских букв. Они записываются в определённой последовательности, что продиктовано соответствующими правилами.

Речь идёт о таких цифрах на латинской раскладке, которые являются аналогом римских символов:

• I означает 1;
• V используется как 5;
• X — это 10;
• L — 50;
• C — 100;
• D — 500;
• M — это 1000.

Если поставить III подряд, это будет 3. А VIII означает уже 8.

Есть специальные правила, которые позволяют разобраться в правилах написания римских букв с помощью латиницы. Используются большие прописные буквы.

Довольно простой метод. Но в основном используется при знании принципов расстановки символов в римских цифрах. Допустим, далеко не все знают, как правильно написать 1947. Поэтому есть и альтернативные решения.

Использование символов

Если вы не хотите использовать латиницу для записи римским символов, тогда можно воспользоваться возможностями встроенной библиотеки текстового редактора Word. Она есть во всех версиях этого приложения.

Для этого нужно сделать следующее:

Аналогичное действие с выделением и вставкой повторяйте для всех последующих необходимых символов.

Преимущество метода в сравнении с предыдущим заключается в том, что здесь цифры римского значения можно вставлять за один раз.

Минус в самом процессе вставки. Приходится открывать множество разных окон, чтобы попасть в нужное меню. Но многим такой вариант подходит.

Будьте внимательными, поскольку набор римских цифр в библиотеке доступен не для всех шрифтов, которые предлагает редактор Word. Если вы выполнили эту инструкцию, но римских чисел и цифр там не оказалось, тогда нужно сделать следующее. Закройте это окно, поменяйте шрифт в текстовом редакторе и повторите процедуру.

Преобразование кода

Выполняя вставку по предыдущей инструкции, многие могли увидеть, что в самом окне «Символ» при выборе одного из римских чисел, в нижней части окна есть пункт «Код знака» и напротив него определённый набор цифр. Он означает код символа, который выбрал из списка пользователь.

Если знать этот код, а также разобраться в комбинациях горячих клавиш для преобразования цифрового кода в символы, то получится ещё один способ выполнения поставленной задачи. Плюс метода в том, что заходить в меню вставки символов не придётся.

В текстовом редакторе Word доступны такие комбинации:

• 2160 – I (1).
• 2161 – II (2).
• 2162 – III (3).
• 2163 – IV (4).
• 2164 – V (5).
• 2165 – VI (6).
• 2166 – VII (7).
• 2167 – VIII (8).
• 2168 – IX (9).
• 2169 – X (10).
• 216A – XI (11).
• 216B – XII (12).
• 216C – L (50).
• 216D – C (100).
• 216E – D (500).
• 216F – M (1000).

Первыми идут коды символов. Далее в строке прописана римская цифра, которая соответствует этому коду. Ну и в конце, то есть в скобках, указывается значение арабскими цифрами.

Опять же, не забывайте, что не каждый шрифт поддерживает работу с такими кодовыми комбинациями. Поэтому используйте тот шрифт, с которым это всё функционирует. Самые популярные и стандартные шрифты точно проблем не вызывают.

Преобразовать цифровой код в символы просто. Для этого нужно прописать на странице редактора код, а затем, не нажимая на пробел, зажать на клавиатуре комбинацию Alt и X.

После этого код превратится в тот символ, который вы прописали.

Важный нюанс в том, что цифровой код обязательно вводится только при включённой английской раскладке. При выборе русского языка ничего не будет работать.

Если это цифры, состоящие более чем из 1 римского числа, тогда при преобразовании кода нужно ставить пробелы между ними. Когда преобразование будет выполнено, просто сотрите ненужные пробелы.

Насколько легко пользователю будет запомнить все это 16 кодовых значений, вопрос спорный. Одни уверены, что при регулярном использовании этого метода процесс доводится до автоматизма. Ведь цифры идут подряд, по мере возрастания, а также по алфавиту.

Но всегда есть альтернативные решения. Выбирайте тот способ, который вам подходит больше.

Формула превращения

Предыдущие способы далеко не идеальные. Символы и отдельные элементы одной цифры приходится прописывать на клавиатуре отдельно, либо каждый раз заходит в раздел с символами. Не каждый пользователь знает о взаимосвязи латинских букв и римских цифр. Да, от 1 до 30 большинство написать могут. Но если это большие цифры, тут уже возникают сложности.

Нужно уметь правильно писать эти значения, разбираться в правописании.

Чтобы избавить себя от всех этих сложностей и получить точный перевод обычного привычного числа, набранного арабскими буквами, можно воспользоваться формулой. Это не так сложно, как кажется.

Процедура выполняется так:

Всё, готово. Теперь перед вами правильно написанные римские цифры. Сомневаться в правильности преобразования не стоит. Такой метод многие называют самым удобным, простым и универсальным.

Запомнить этот код не сложно. Да и горячие клавиши используются понятные. Зато так можно преобразовывать самые сложные комбинации. И вовсе не обязательно знать все правила написания римских цифр и чисел. Программа Word всё сделает за вас.

Существует альтернативный способ, который заключается в том, что вы находите в интернете значения в нужном формате, копируете и вставляете их в текст.

Ознакомившись с этим простым материалом, вы без затруднений сможете написать в Word римские числа. Эта проблема больше не поставит вас в тупик. Воспользуйтесь наиболее удобным для вас способом из предложенных. Пишите в комментариях, помогла ли вам статья и спрашивайте всё, что интересует по рассмотренной теме.