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Episode 15: Etruscans, Romans and a Modified Alphabet

The History of English Podcast

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What Happened to the Greek Alphabet?

The etruscan language had all of these un voiced sounds, the p sound, the t sound and the k sound. Linguists call these sounds voice stops. And apparently etruscans did not use voice stops at all in their language. So the third letter, gamma, was pronounced with a k sound ecause iy didn't have a g sound. That's ultimately how the ro s inherited it, and that's why the modern letter c became the modern letter C in latin. The alphabet has undergone relatively few changes, by comparison since the romans adopted it.

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