Why did the letters in the alphabet shift position?

Question

When presented with the Greek alphabet, it is like this:

Α Β Γ Δ Ε Ζ Η Θ Ι Κ Λ Μ Ν Ξ Ο Π Ρ Σ Τ Υ Φ Χ Ψ Ω

Or the Etruscan alphabet:

A B G D E V Z H Θ I K L M N Ξ O P Ś Q R S T Y X Φ Ψ

But if we are presented with the Latin alphabet, it looks like this:

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Apart from letters changing there are some notable differences: The position of the G and Z sound for example.

Why and when did this all shift? Is it something from a later period or did the Romans also use the order, we use now?

Answer 1

The letter Γ was sometimes written 𐌂 and was taken into the Latin alphabet as C, so the position did not change. The letter G was only added later (3rd century BC) to the Latin alphabet, to disambiguate the sound /g/ from /k/ (i.e. soft C from hard C) and took the spot of Z (at that time /r/), which was dropped, only to be reintroduced two centuries later (then /dz/) for Greek loanwords, but this time at the end of the alphabet.

Wikipedia has good info about this:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z#Latin
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Latin_alphabet#Old_Latin_period
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Italic_script

Answer 2

Typically when languages introduce new letters, they place them after the already-existing ones. This happened when Greek introduced Υ υ upsilon (from a variant of Ϝ ϝ digamma which of course occupied an earlier position), Φ φ phi, Χ χ chi, Ψ ψ psi, & Ω ω omega; it happened when Arabic introduced ث tha, خ kha, ذ dhal, ض dad, ظ za, غ ghayn, & ء hamza; and it happend with Cyrillic (here exemplified by the Russian alphabet) Ц ц tse, Ч ч che, Ш ш sha, Щ щ shcha, Ъ ъ yer, Ы ы yery, Ь ь yer', Э э e, Ю ю yu, & Я я ya.

I should note here that there is another pattern that also commonly occurs, when two variants of the same letter become interpreted as distinct letters, and the newly independent letter is inserted directly after the original. This occurred in the Latin alphabet with I i & J j, as well as U u, V v, & W w.

This is exactly what happened with Latin Z z (and also Y y). The Archaic Latin Alphabet essentially copied the Etruscan Alphabet, so it inherited Z z in its original position in the alphabet.

Around the 3rd Century BCE (still the Old Latin Period), Z z was dropped entirely from the alphabet, and G g (originally a modified C c) took its place (something that is rather surprising).

In the Classical Period, around the 1st Century BCE, the letters Y y and Z z are introduced from Greek and, as expected, they are added to the end of the alphabet. The fact they are (recent) loans from Greek is clear from their names. Y y is explicitly called ī Graeca "Greek I", and Z z is called zēta (a direct loan of the Greek name, rather than an inherited acrophonic Etruscan name which would have been either *zē or *ēz).

It's because of the period where Z z wasn't in the alphabet that it ended up occupying the final position.

Answer 3

The Etruscan alphabet you presented in your question is actually a transliteration. The actual Etruscan inscriptions are in one of the "Old Italic" alphabets derived from the Greek one.

Unicode now has separate code points for these (although it unifies various related alphabets like Etruscan, Oscan, and Old Latin) and if you download the right fonts, you'll be able to see them (although of course, a single font cannot represent the diversity of forms that used to be used). Here is the Etruscan alphabet encoded in "Old Italic":

𐌀 𐌁 𐌂 𐌃 𐌄 𐌅 𐌆 𐌇 𐌈 𐌉 𐌊 𐌋 𐌌 𐌍 𐌎 𐌏 𐌐 𐌑 𐌒 𐌓 𐌔 𐌕 𐌖 𐌗 𐌘 𐌙
_{(picture in case the characters don't display correctly)}

(taken from this Wikipedia article: Old Italic script)

You can see (or maybe you can't) that the Etruscan letter transliterated as "G" actually has the form of C. This also applies to the Etruscan letter transliterated as "V," which actually had the form of F. Etruscan did not have a /g/ sound distinct from /k/ (or any distinct voiced plosive consonants in general), so when it adapted this letter from Greek gamma, it repurposed it for the sound /k/. This carried over into Latin; in Old Latin the letter C was used for both /k/ and /g/. The modern Latin letter G was created to distinguish the sound /g/ from the sound /k/, which came to be represented mostly by C.

The letter Z ended up not being used to represent any native Latin sound, so the new letter G took the place of Z in the Latin alphabet. Later, when Z came to be used regularly as a way of representing Greek zeta, it was added to the end of the alphabet.

Answer 4

We can probably guess that Romans did not feel need to synchronize Latin alphabet with Greek alphabet.

The Latin alphabet was originally created based on the Etruscan alphabet, which was created based on the Western Greek alphabet. See Old Italic scripts and Latin_alphabet: History. The Etruscan alphabet and all versions of the Greek alphabet had several letters that were never copied to Latin alphabet.

The Romans copied the letters ⟨Y⟩ and ⟨Z⟩ from the Greek alphabet to the Latin alphabet in the 1st century BCE just for writing some words borrowed from the Greek language. There were no native Latin words that needed these letters. The Romans did not think that these new letters were some modifications of preexisting letters, so they did not place the new letters directly before or after such preexisting letters and instead they placed the new letters at the end of the Latin alphabet.

Compare how later Europeans in post-antiquity created the letter ⟨J⟩ based on ⟨I⟩ and placed it directly after ⟨I⟩, created the letter ⟨W⟩ based on ⟨V⟩ and placed it directly after ⟨V⟩, and split the letter ⟨V⟩ into two letters ⟨U⟩ and ⟨V⟩ (previously graphic variants of the same letter) placed consecutively.

However historically the Latin letter ⟨V⟩ is derived from the Greek letter ⟨Υ,υ⟩ (upsilon/ypsilon). In earlier Ancient Greek, ⟨Υ,υ⟩ meant the vowel /u/, but by Classical times, at least in prestige Attic dialect, /u/ changed into /y/, and ⟨Υ,υ⟩ still meant /y/ in 1st century BCE (at the time when the Latin alphabet was expanded). Since the pronunciations of the Greek letter ⟨Υ,υ⟩ and the Latin letter ⟨V⟩ diverged, ⟨V⟩ would no longer suffice for some words newly borrowed from the Greek language. In Medieval Greek, /y/ changed into /i/, and remains so in Modern Greek. ⟨Ι,ι⟩ (iota) and some other letters also mean /i/ in Modern Greek.