Today’s post comes from Emily Landau, a teacher of Latin at Eaglebrook School in MA.
While gladiators, mythology and the cursus honorum are fun, I’m a big fan of covering more quotidian topics of ancient Roman life, things so simple that students frequently don’t even think to ask about them. One of my favorites is “what did Roman handwriting look like?”
While most of the more visible surviving examples of Roman writing (e.g. inscriptions) use the familiar grand capital letters that gave way to our modern Latin alphabet, your everyday literate Roman wrote using a form of script that would be very unfamiliar to readers today. (The most famous examples of this writing are probably the Vindolanda Tablets of 1st century Britannia.)
This handout is designed to introduce the subject of Roman orthography to students. It covers the Latin abecedarium, the names of the letters, the cursive script, and information about things like spacing and macrons. The end of the worksheet gives students an opportunity to attempt to read and write in Roman script.
Some useful tidbits for tailoring your lesson that aren’t on the handout:
– This is a good time to talk about the Roman letter V (pronounced ū). Students will frequently say that in Latin, “v’s are pronounced like w’s.” However, that character is not a modern V. It’s a U, which even in English can function as both a consonant and a vowel; cf. words like queen (“kween”; slow it down and you can hear how it’s really “koo-een”).
– The letter G is a modified C, invented (according to Plutarch) by one Spurius Carvilius Ruga, a 3rd century BCE schoolmaster, in order to show distinction between the aspirated and non-aspirated sound. This is why the common praenomina Gaius and Gnaeus continued to be abbreviated as C. and Cn. through the Imperial era: Old traditions die hard.
– The letter Y is a borrowing of the Greek
upsilon (Z and K are also borrowings, of
zeta and
kappa, respectively)
. Accordingly, the Romans called the letter “ī Graeca” which survives in various languages, including French (
i grec) Polish (
igrek), and Vietnamese (
i gờrét).- On that note, the Romans sometimes used Greek letters to make non-Latin words look more “foreign.” Hence the name of Carthage was sometimes spelled “Karthago” in order to emphasize the “other-ness” of Rome’s rival.
The Roman Alphabet