Pomerium marker with digamma inversum in red - Vatican Museums - inv 9268

The Claudian letters were developed by the Roman emperor Claudius (reigned 41–54). He introduced three new letters to the

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 th ...

: *Ↄ or ↃϹ/X (''antisigma'') to replace BS and PS, much as X stood in for CS and GS. The shape of this letter is disputed, however, since no inscription bearing it has been found. Franz Bücheler identified it with the variant

Roman numeral Roman numerals are a numeral system that originated in ancient Rome and remained the usual way of writing numbers throughout Europe well into the Late Middle Ages. Numbers are written with combinations of letters from the Latin alphabet, ea ...

Ↄ, Bücheler, Franz: (Latin), Elberfeld (Germany) 1856 but 20th century philologists, working from copies of

Priscian Priscianus Caesariensis (), commonly known as Priscian ( or ), was a Latin grammarian and the author of the ''Institutes of Grammar'', which was the standard textbook for the study of Latin during the Middle Ages. It also provided the raw materia ...

's books, believe it to instead resemble two linked Cs (Ↄ+Ϲ), which was a preexisting variant of Greek sigma, and easily mistaken for X by later writers. Revilo P. Oliver argued that Claudius would have based this letter upon the Arcadian variant of

psi Psi, PSI or Ψ may refer to: Alphabetic letters * Psi (Greek) (Ψ, ψ), the 23rd letter of the Greek alphabet * Psi (Cyrillic) (Ѱ, ѱ), letter of the early Cyrillic alphabet, adopted from Greek Arts and entertainment * "Psi" as an abbreviatio ...

or . This letter should not be confused with the "open O" letter Ɔ. *Ⅎ, a turned F or

digamma Digamma or wau (uppercase: Ϝ, lowercase: ϝ, numeral: ϛ) is an archaic letter of the Greek alphabet. It originally stood for the sound but it has remained in use principally as a Greek numeral for 6. Whereas it was originally called ''waw' ...

(''digamma inversum'') to be used instead of the letter V when denoting the consonantal phoneme (/ β). Thus, it resembles the use of the letter V in modern Latin texts, where the vocalic use of the letter V is represented by its variant U which has been recognized as a different letter only later. *Ⱶ, a half H. The value of this letter is unclear, but perhaps it represented the so-called '' sonus medius'', a short vowel sound (likely // or //) used before

labial consonant Labial consonants are consonants in which one or both lips are the active articulator. The two common labial articulations are bilabials, articulated using both lips, and labiodentals, articulated with the lower lip against the upper teeth, bot ...

s in

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 ...

words such as ''optumus''/''optimus''. The letter was later used as a variant of y in inscriptions for short Greek

upsilon Upsilon (, ; uppercase Υ, lowercase υ; el, ''ýpsilon'' ) or ypsilon is the 20th letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, grc, Υʹ, label=none has a value of 400. It is derived from the Phoenician waw . E ...

(as in ''Olympicus''). It may have disappeared because the ''sonus medius'' itself disappeared from spoken language.

Usage

These letters were used to a small extent on public inscriptions dating from Claudius' reign, but their use was abandoned after his death. Their forms were probably chosen to ease the transition, as they could be made from templates for existing letters. He may have been inspired by his ancestor Appius Claudius the Censor, who made earlier changes to the Latin alphabet. Claudius did indeed introduce his letters during his own term as censor (47–48), using arguments preserved in the historian

Tacitus Publius Cornelius Tacitus, known simply as Tacitus ( , ; – ), was a Roman historian and politician. Tacitus is widely regarded as one of the greatest Roman historians by modern scholars. The surviving portions of his two major works—the ...

' account of his reign, although the original proclamation is no longer extant. Suetonius said of Claudius' letters: Support for the letters was added in version 5.0.0 of

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, wh ...

. Although these letters, as all Latin letters in antiquity, originally occurred only in capital form, lowercase forms have been introduced to meet Unicode casing requirements. The minuscule form for the turned F was designed as a turned small capital F and should not be confused with the IPA symbol representing a voiced palatal stop. The letters are encoded as follows:

References

{{reflist Palaeographic letters Latin language Claudius 1st-century introductions

Usage

See also

References