137. The Roman Alphabet
The Roman alphabet was derived from the Greek. But it is clear that it was not taken from the Greek alphabet after this had reached its final or classic form. If such had been the case, the Roman letters, such as we still use them, would undoubtedly be more similar to the Greek ones than they are, and certain discrepancies in the values of the letters, as well as in their order, would not have occurred. In the old days of writing, when a number of competing forms of the alphabet still flourished in the several Greek cities, one of these forms, developed at Chalcis on Eubœa and allied on the whole to those of the Western Hellenic world, was carried to Italy. There, after a further course of local diversification, one of its subvarieties became fixed in the usage of the inhabitants of the city of Rome. Now the Romans at this period still pronounced the sound H, which later became feeble in the Latin tongue and finally died out. On the other hand the distinction between short and long (or close and open) E, which the Greeks after many experiments came to recognize as important in their speech, was of no great moment in Latin. The result was that whereas classic Greek turned both the Semitic H’s into E’s, Latin accepted only the first of these modifications, that one affecting the fifth letter of the alphabet, whereas the other H, occupying the eighth place in the alphabetic series, continued to be used by the Romans with approximately its original Semitic value. This retention, however, was possible because Greek writing was still in a transitional, vacillating stage when it reached the Romans. The Western Greek form of the alphabet that was carried to Italy was still using the eighth letter as an H; so that the Romans were merely following their teachers. Had they based their letters on the “classic” Greek alphabet which was standardized a few hundred years later, the eighth as well as the fifth letter would have come to them with its vowel value crystallized. In that case the Romans would either have dispensed altogether with writing H, or would have invented a totally new sign for it and probably tacked it on to the end of the alphabet, as both they and the Greeks did in the case of several other letters.
The net result is the curious one that whereas the Roman alphabet is derived from the Greek, and therefore subsequent, it remains, in this particular matter of the eighth letter, nearer to the original Semitic alphabet.
There are other letters in the Roman alphabet which corroborate the fact of its being modeled on a system of the period when Greek writing still remained under the direct influence of Phœnician. The Semitic languages possessed two K sounds, usually called Kaph and Koph, or K and Q, of which the former was pronounced much like our K and the latter farther back toward the throat. The Greeks not having both these sounds kept the letter Kaph, which they called Kappa, and gradually discarded Koph or Koppa. Yet before its meaning had become entirely lost, they had carried it to Italy. There the Romans seized upon it to designate a variety of K which the Greek dialects did not possess, namely KW; which is of course the phonetic value which the symbol Q still has in English. The Romans were reasonable in this procedure, for in early Latin the Q was produced with the extreme rear of the tongue, much like the original Koph.