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XII.] The other Greek alterations and additions may be passed over, as of less account.

The Latin alphabet was taken from one of the older forms of the Greek, before the characters of the latter had assumed in all points the form and value with which we are most familiar—when the H, for example, had still its value as a breathing, and had not been converted into a long ē. The system of spoken sounds for which the Latin required written representatives was but a simple one: to the fifteen articulations which, as we saw in the seventh lecture (p. ), had been the primitive possession of the Indo-European family, it had added but three, the medial vowels e and o, and the labial spirant f (it had, indeed, the semivowels y and w also, but did not distinguish them in writing from the vowels i and u, with which they are so nearly identical: I and J, U and V, are but graphic variations of the same sign). Nearly all the Latin letters are the same with the Greek, or differ from them only by slight diversities of form: but one or two points of discordance need a word of explanation. The Latin system is most peculiar in rejecting the K, which was found in every Greek alphabet, of whatever period or locality, and in writing both its k and g sounds at first by a single letter, C, the ancient sign for the g-sound only: then, when it came to itself, and felt again the need of a separate designation for each, it knew no better than to retain the C for the k-sound, and to add a diacritical mark at its lower end, making a G, for the purpose of denoting the corresponding sonant, g. By a somewhat similar process of transfer, we have come to write the p-sound by the sign, P, which formerly belonged to the r: when the older sign for p,, had assumed a shape so nearly agreeing with the P that the two were not readily distinguished from one another, a tag was hung upon the crook of the latter as a further diacritical mark, and it was thus made into R. For the f-sound, the ancient sign for w, the Greek digamma, F, was somewhat arbitrarily adopted, its only special recommendation being that both w and f were labials. The Q represents an old Phenician letter, a deeper guttural than k, rejected by the later Greek alphabets as superfluous—and really no better than superfluous in the Latin, where the