Hey all, I'm planning on doing some fairly basic Latin lessons as an occasional diary series, because, well, I lost interest in the commitment to researching my last series. I have a couple in the can, and if there's some interest, I'll keep working.
The Classical Latin alphabet, like AFAIK all Western alphabets, is derived from an ancient Semitic alphabet. It is very similar to the Greek, and the other alphabets of the West, and is a primary source of the English. Therefore, it is very familiar to most of us.
It has a few fewer letters, however, and they don't all function in the same ways that we are used to. The following letters are in the Latin alphabet:
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
K
L
M
N
O
p
Q
R
S
T
U
X
Y
Z
Notice- no J, V, or W. I know, I know, we're always seeing names like Julius Caesar, and he himself said the words "Veni, vidi, vici". Not quite.
Dominus Caesar would have had his name spelled Iulius. It would have been pronounced as if in English it were spelled Yulius, like Yule. The letter J did not yet exist, and is in fact quite a modern invention.
As are the letters V and W. While we often see what appears to be the letter V in Latin, this is in fact because the letter U was shaped like V in classical Latin. So on one of the buildings on my campus we see "VNIVERSITY".
And while we're on that, in classical Latin there was no lower case. If they were blogging, THEY'D ALWAYS BE SHOUTING. But it's even worse than that. In Latin, there were no spaces. My sig, "Deus mihi iustitiam dabit", would have appeared like "DEUSMIHIIUSTITIAMDABIT".
But that's starting to get us off on a tangent. Back to V and W. Basically, there is no V sound in Latin. So instead of "Veni, vidi, vici", it would have been "Ueni, uidi, uici" (I won't subject you to all caps and no spaces). As I was taught, the U in front of a vowel is pronounced as a W (I'll get to that at a later date).
And before I end this diary, I should also point out that the letters K and Z are generally only found in foreign (non-Latin) words and names, especially Greek. There are a lot of borrowed Greek words in Latin, and Greek names and place-names are also fairly common.
There it is, your first Daily Kos lesson in Latin from me. It should be fairly easy to remember for most, since it's the same alphabet most of you've been using for your whole lives. But with fewer letters, so less work!
Look for future lessons, moving at a fairly slow pace like this. I will generally speak of the structure of the language, rather than getting into the vocabulary and other things which I don't find as necessary, because all a casual user of Latin needs is a good understanding of the structure and a Latin dictionary.