23rd April 2017, 4:49 PM
(This post was last modified: 23rd April 2017, 10:22 PM by A Black Falcon.)
Sacred Jellybean Wrote:Interesting stuff.We kind of think of the alphabet as something which doesn't change much, but it does, every once in a while since the Romans invented the current forms of most of our letters. It's been several centuries since the last change -- the last I can think of offhand to block letters is making the lowercase 's' look as it does now, as opposed to the almost 'f'-but-without-a-crossbar look it had back in the 1700s, though I may be missing something -- but it does happen. Basically V and I used to have both a consonant form and a vowel form, but in the ~13-1500s the letters split into two, with separate letters for the vowel (I and U) and consonant (J and V) forms.
Of course spelling standardization is another huge thing which happened over the past few centuries, but that's not about the form of the letters themselves.
(I've never been any good at grammar... I can use English grammar just fine, and I'm decent at spelling, but knowing parts of speech and such, beyond the basics? Forget it, I never was very good at that stuff... which is surely part of why I found Spanish so hard in school. :p )