Latin script

The Latin alphabet is a descendant of a western Greek script which was taken over by the Romans — according to the prevailing view — not directly but through the mediation of the Etruscans, who had modified it considerably in accordance with the character of their language. Up to the first century BC it comprised twenty-one letters (A to X); then Y and Z were introduced (originally in order to write Greek names and foreign words). After an archaic period (seventh to fourth century BC), when it was written from right to left or in lines of alternating directions (boustrophedon), the practice of writing from left to right became the norm. The letters acquired the classical shapes, though P (which was derived from an angular P with short right stroke) is often not closed even in the majuscule script of codices.

In the script of inscriptions, which is the only evidence we have up to the beginning of the first century BC, certain cursive tendencies are already visible two centuries before that date. At the time E and F appear as ∥ and ∣′, forms that are typical of wax-tablet script. In this script, whose best-known monuments, dating from the mid first and the second century, are the tablets found at Pompeii and in Transylvania, the normal script (as already with the incised script (‘graffiti’) from Sulla's time) is much altered by the dissolving of the letters into strokes drawn as much as possible in the same direction.