Designs

Free Alphabet SVG Files

The Latin Alphabet SVG is an alphabetic writing system that dates back to the Greek alphabet and which appeared in the Latin language in the middle of the first millennium B.C. and later spread all over the world.

The modern Latin alphabet, which is the basis of writing of most of the Romanesque, Germanic, as well as many other languages, in its basic version consists of 26 letters. Letters in different languages are called differently.

Writing on the basis of the Latin Alphabet SVG uses all languages of the Romanesque (except for the Moldavian language in the DMR and, in some countries, the Sephardic language), German (except Yiddish), Celtic and Baltic groups, as well as some languages of the Slavic, Finno-Ugric and Turkic groups, Semitic and Iranian groups, Albanian, Basque, as well as some languages of Indochina (Vietnamese), Myanmar, most of the languages of the Scandinavian archipelago and the Philippines, Africa (Sub-Saharan), America, Australia and Oceania, and artificial languages (e.g. Esperanto).

Alphabet SVG History

The oldest Latin inscriptions found date back to the 7th century B.C. The direction of the letter in the archaic inscriptions could be from left to right or from right to left. Bustrofedon inscriptions are also testified.

There are two hypotheses of the origin of the Latin Alphabet SVG. According to one hypothesis, the Latin language borrowed the alphabetic writing from the Greek directly, while according to another hypothesis, the Etruscan alphabet turned out to be a kind of intermediary. In both cases, the basis of the Latin alphabet is the Western Greek (South Italian) variant of the Greek alphabet. The Latin alphabet was formed approximately in the 7th century BC and initially included only 21 letters: A, B, C, D, E, F, Z, H, I, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, V and X.

In the archaic Latin Alphabet SVG, the letters C (dating back to the archaic slanting of the Greek scale Γ), K (from the Greek mouthpiece Κ) and Q (from the later exclusion of the letter koppa from the Greek alphabet Ϙ) were used to denote sounds [k] and [g]; K was placed before A; the letter Q (sometimes) was placed before V and O; and C was placed everywhere.

The letters Θ, Φ and Ψ were not used to write words, but were used as characters for numbers 100, 1000 and 50. Later, these functions passed to the letters C, M and L, respectively.

The letter Z (analogue of the Greek zeta Ζ) was excluded from the alphabet in 312 BC. (later it was restored). In 234 B.C., a separate letter G was created in place of the excluded Z by adding a cross line to C. In the first century BC, after the conquest of Greece by Rome, the letters Y and Z were added to write words borrowed from the Greek language. The name of the letter Y (“i Graeca”, i.e. “and Greek”) was introduced to distinguish this letter from I, as there was no Greek sound corresponding to the ipsilon in Latin phonetics. Most of the letters were not called Greek names of their analogues (originating from the Phoenician alphabet), but simply by their pronunciation (for vowels) or (for consonants) by adding a sound [eː] after the consonant (for explosive consonants) or [ɛ] before the consonant (for frictive and sonorious consonants) ([aː], [beː], [keː], [deː], …), with the exception of K [kaː] and Q [kuː], in order to distinguish them from C [keː] and H [haː].