Old Italic is a

Unicode block A Unicode block is one of several contiguous ranges of numeric character codes (code points) of the Unicode character set that are defined by the Unicode Consortium for administrative and documentation purposes. Typically, proposals such as the ad ...

containing a unified repertoire of several

Old Italic scripts The Old Italic scripts are a family of similar ancient writing systems used in the Italian Peninsula between about 700 and 100 BC, for various languages spoken in that time and place. The most notable member is the Etruscan alphabet, which ...

used in various parts of Italy starting about 700 BCE, including the

Etruscan alphabet The Etruscan alphabet was the alphabet used by the Etruscans, an ancient civilization of central and northern Italy, to write their language, from about 700 BC to sometime around 100 AD. The Etruscan alphabet derives from the Euboean alphabet ...

and others that were derived from it (or cognate with it). All those languages went extinct by about the 1st century BCE; except

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

, which however evolved its own

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 o ...

that is covered by other Unicode blocks.

Unification

For each script, each code point denotes zero or more symbols that are believed to be equivalent in that script, even if they had very different shapes. For example, in the Archaic Etruscan alphabet (used from the 7th to 5th century BCE) one letter, apparently derived from the Western Ancient Greek letter theta, could be written as a circle with an inscribed "X", or just as a circle. Those two symbols were mapped to the same code point U+10308, "OLD ITALIC LETTER THE" = "𐌈". Also, two symbols in different scripts were mapped to the same code point if they appeared to have a genetic or phonemic identity, even if their shapes and/or pronunciations were clearly distinct. For example, the Etruscans used a symbol like "C", believed to have evolved from the Ancient Greek letter gamma, for the "k" sound of their language. That symbol was assumed to be the origin of (or cognate with) a symbol of the Oscan alphabet that looked like "<" and had the sound of "g".Oscan
. Online article at the Language Gulper website. Accessed on 2019-05-02. Those two symbols were therefore mapped to the same code point U+10302, "OLD ITALIC LETTER KE" = "𐌂". Therefore, the appearance of those code points when displayed or printed—as in the table below—is likely to be incorrect, unless they are rendered with a font specifically designed for the particular language and letter style of the text.

Block

History

The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Old Italic block:

References

{{reflist Unicode blocks