. This custom produced its complement in the shape of
, to mark the soft breathing; until in the eleventh century of our era, the two breathings were worn down into semicircular form, thus
,
. Another rejected symbol was the vau, formed like the letter F and sounded like our V. It dropped out of usage, and they forgot its name, although it had been considerably used by the old poets, in connexion with whom it is usually named digamma, because of its resemblance to a double gamma, or one gamma superimposed on another. It was found necessary to have a character for u, and advantageous to use single symbols for double letters frequently occurring, such as ph, kh, ps and oo (long o). The old Eastern form of vau supplied the u; in fact, having dropped the letter as a consonant out of its sixth place in the alphabet, they put it in its vowel-character at the end. The symbol of the discarded koppa was used for the Ph, which was not equivalent in sound to our ph, but must have resembled the German pf. The discarded tsada (a trident) was used to represent, in some places ps, in others kh, but finally the symbol fell into two distinct forms, by being written upright as + (ψ) and leaning sidewise as × (χ). By the time of Herodotus the Greek alphabet may be considered as having reached exactly its present form in capital letters. The cursive hand which must have existed at all times of Greek writing was simply a rapid deformation of the capitals, and consequently did not attain to any uniformly distinctive character till much later. The general use of minuscules in any such uniform type is always referred to the eighth century after Christ, but really there is no essential change of form between the cursive letters a hundred years before Christ and those of a thousand years after Christ. The chief difference is in the greater freedom and fluency of the late letters, an air of practised familiarity which is lacking in the earlier cursive.
Writing in Italy from 700 to 100 B.C.
The Greeks and the Phœnicians had a similar aptitude for establishing colonies abroad to that which the English have shown during the past three centuries. Thus the coast line of the Mediterranean from Tripoli to Morocco, and from Sicily and Southern Italy to Spain and Gaul, was dotted with Punic and Greek settlements created for purely commercial purposes, but gaining an independent importance as time went on. The chief seat of Phœnician domination was at Carthage; of Greek nationality at Syracuse, Cumæ (near Naples), and Marseilles. The age at which those colonies acquired political greatness may be roughly set down as in the fourth century before Christ, but it is sufficient for our purpose to know that they had been founded considerably earlier; and that the art of writing had been carried westward as far back at least as the seventh or eighth century B.C. It was virtually the one alphabet, applied by various races to their various languages, which was used at Carthage and Cadiz, at Marseilles and in Sicily and Italy, in the seventh century B.C. Italy was occupied by several distinct sets of people. The Umbrians, Latins, and Oscans occupied all the middle of the peninsula; the Pelasgic tribes who were in the heel and toe of the geographical boot were nearly Grecised; the Etruscans held Tuscany, and Celts occupied Lombardy. Mommsen thought that the Greek alphabet had reached the Italians more than 1300 years before Christ; but a more modest estimate will be safer. It was probably about seven hundred years B.C. when the Etrurians received their alphabet from the Greeks; and there is no reason for thinking, as Mommsen implies, that their first contact with Greek letters had been elsewhere than in Italy. The alphabet reached them no doubt from Cumæ, as it did the Latins, and there was sufficient variation in the practice of the Greek colonies in Italy to account for the differences which mark Etruscan, Umbrian, and Latin writing.