The Old English Latin alphabet generally consisted of about 24 letters, and was used for writing

Old English Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the mid-5th ...

from the 8th to the 12th centuries. Of these letters, most were directly adopted from the

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and the ...

, two were modified Latin letters ( Æ, Ð), and two developed from the

runic alphabet Runes are the letters in a set of related alphabets known as runic alphabets native to the Germanic peoples. Runes were used to write various Germanic languages (with some exceptions) before they adopted the Latin alphabet, and for specialised ...

( Ƿ, Þ). The letters Q and Z were essentially left unused outside of foreign names, while the letter K was used by some writers but not by others. The

Middle English Middle English (abbreviated to ME) is a form of the English language that was spoken after the Norman conquest of 1066, until the late 15th century. The English language underwent distinct variations and developments following the Old Englis ...

manuscripts Stowe MS 57 and Cotton Titus D 18 do not present the letters in the exact same order, but both place the non-standard Latin letters at the end of the alphabet.

was first written in

runes Runes are the letters in a set of related alphabets known as runic alphabets native to the Germanic peoples. Runes were used to write various Germanic languages (with some exceptions) before they adopted the Latin alphabet, and for specialised ...

(''

futhorc Anglo-Saxon runes ( ang, rūna ᚱᚢᚾᚪ) are runes used by the early Anglo-Saxons as an alphabet in their writing system. The characters are known collectively as the futhorc (ᚠᚢᚦᚩᚱᚳ ''fuþorc'') from the Old English sound va ...

'') but shifted to a (minuscule) half-uncial script of the

introduced by

Irish Christian missionaries Irish may refer to: Common meanings * Someone or something of, from, or related to: ** Ireland, an island situated off the north-western coast of continental Europe ***Éire, Irish language name for the isle ** Northern Ireland, a constituent unit ...

from around the 8th century. This was replaced by

Insular script Insular script was a medieval script system originating from Ireland that spread to Anglo-Saxon England and continental Europe under the influence of Irish Christianity. Irish missionaries took the script to continental Europe, where they found ...

, a cursive and pointed version of the half-uncial script. This was used until the end of the 12th century when continental

Carolingian minuscule Carolingian minuscule or Caroline minuscule is a script which developed as a calligraphic standard in the medieval European period so that the Latin alphabet of Jerome's Vulgate Bible could be easily recognized by the literate class from one reg ...

(also known as ''Caroline'') replaced the insular, along with a shift in spelling conventions toward the

Old French Old French (, , ; Modern French: ) was the language spoken in most of the northern half of France from approximately the 8th to the 14th centuries. Rather than a unified language, Old French was a linkage of Romance dialects, mutually intel ...

alphabet, leading to Middle English. The letter ðæt (called ''eth'' or ''edh'' in modern English) was an alteration of Latin , and the runic letters

thorn Thorn(s) or The Thorn(s) may refer to: Botany * Thorns, spines, and prickles, sharp structures on plants * ''Crataegus monogyna'', or common hawthorn, a plant species Comics and literature * Rose and Thorn, the two personalities of two DC Comic ...

and

wynn Wynn or wyn (; also spelled wen, ƿynn, and ƿen) is a letter of the Old English alphabet, where it is used to represent the sound . History The letter "W" While the earliest Old English texts represent this phoneme with the digraph , ...

are borrowings from futhorc. Also used was a symbol for the

conjunction Conjunction may refer to: * Conjunction (grammar), a part of speech * Logical conjunction, a mathematical operator ** Conjunction introduction, a rule of inference of propositional logic * Conjunction (astronomy), in which two astronomical bodies ...

''and'', a character similar to the number seven (, called a

Tironian et Tironian notes ( la, notae Tironianae, links=no) are a set of thousands of signs that were formerly used in a system of shorthand (Tironian shorthand) dating from the 1st century BCE and named after Tiro, a personal secretary to Marcus Tullius Ci ...

or ''ond''), and a symbol for the

relative pronoun A relative pronoun is a pronoun that marks a relative clause. It serves the purpose of conjoining modifying information about an antecedent referent. An example is the word ''which'' in the sentence "This is the house which Jack built." Here the r ...

'' þæt'', a thorn with a crossbar through the ascender (). Macrons over vowels were rarely used to indicate long vowels, but it was also used occasionally as a nasal indicator (sort of like a

tilde The tilde () or , is a grapheme with several uses. The name of the character came into English from Spanish, which in turn came from the Latin '' titulus'', meaning "title" or "superscription". Its primary use is as a diacritic (accent) i ...

) if the vowel was succeeded by an s (''m''s or ''n''s would turn into ◌̄s).

References

Bibliography

* J. Bosworth & T. Northcote Toller, ''

An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary ''An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary'' is a dictionary of Old English, a language that is also known as Anglo-Saxon. Four editions of the dictionary were published. It has often (especially in earlier times) been considered the definitive lexicon for ...

'', Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1898

External links

*{{cite web , title=Old English / Anglo-Saxon (Englisc) , url=http://www.omniglot.com/writing/oldenglish.htm , work=Omniglot , publisher=omniglot.com , access-date=17 July 2010 , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100407164322/http://www.omniglot.com/writing/oldenglish.htm , archive-date=7 April 2010 , url-status=dead Latin alphabets

Alphabet An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a syllab ...