140. The Sixth and Seventh Letters
The letters, such as Q, in which the Roman alphabet is in agreement with the original Semitic one and differs from classic Greek writing, might lead, if taken by themselves, to the conjecture that the ancient Italians had perhaps not derived their alphabet via the Greeks at all, but directly from the Phœnicians. But this conclusion is untenable: first, because the forms of the earliest Latin and Greek letters are on the whole more similar to each other than to the contemporaneous Semitic forms; and second because of the deviations from the Semitic prototype which the Latin and Greek systems share with each other, as in the vowels.
The sixth letter of the Roman alphabet, F, the Semitic Waw or Vau, is wanting in classic Greek, although retained in certain early and provincial dialects. One of the brilliant discoveries of classical philology was that the speech in which the Homeric poems were originally composed still possessed this sound, numerous irregularities of scansion being explainable only on the basis of its original presence. The letter for it looked like two Greek G’s, one set on top of the other. Hence, later when it had long gone out of use except as a numeral, it was called Di-gamma or “double-G.”
The seventh Semitic letter, which in Greek finally became the sixth on account of the loss of the Vau or Digamma, was Zayin, Greek Zeta, our Z. This, in turn, the Romans omitted, because their language lacked the sound. They filled its place with G, which in Phœnician and Greek came in third position. The shift came about thus. The earliest Italic writing followed the Semitic and Greek original and had C, pronounced G, as its third letter. But in Etruscan the sounds K and G were hardly distinguished. K therefore went out of use; and the early Romans followed the precedent of their cultured and influential Etruscan neighbors. For a time, therefore, the single character C was employed for both G and K in Latin. Finally, about the third century before Christ, a differentiation being found desirable, the C was written as C when it stood for the “hard” or voiceless sound K, but with a small stroke, as G, when it represented the soft or voiced sound; and, the seventh place in the alphabet, that of Z, being vacant, this modified character was inserted. Thus original C, pronounced G, was split by the Latins into two similar letters, one retaining the shape and place in the alphabet of Gimel-Gamma, the other retaining the sound of Gamma but displacing Zeta.
But the letter Z did not remain permanently eliminated from western writing. As long as the Romans continued rude and self-sufficient, they had no need of a character for a sound which they did not speak. When they became powerful, expanded, touched Greek civilization, and borrowed from this its literature, philosophy, and arts, they took over also many Greek names and words. As Z occurred in these, they adopted the character. Yet to have put it in its original seventh place which was now occupied by G, would have disturbed the position of the following letters. It was obviously more convenient to hang this once rejected and now reinstated character on at the end of the alphabet; and there it is now.