Unicode Demystified

The Latin Alphabet

As this text is an English-language book directed primarily toward an English-speaking audience, and as the bulk of text stored in computer systems today is in English or other European languages, the logical place to begin our tour of the Unicode character repertoire is with the Latin alphabet. The Latin alphabet is so named, of course, because it was originally used to write Latin (it's also frequently called the Roman alphabet because it was developed by the ancient Romans). The Latin alphabet evolved from the Etruscan alphabet, which in turn evolved from the Greek alphabet. Later, some letters that weren't used in Etruscan were borrowed straight into the Latin alphabet from the Greek alphabet. The Latin alphabet acquired ...