Talk:Latin script

Disambiguation
What word is disambiguated here? Propose removal of the dab-template. -DePiep (talk) 12:47, 14 August 2010 (UTC)
 * ✅ Bogdan Nagachop (talk) 11:37, 8 August 2011 (UTC)

Why does the script show up as Latn AND Latinx‽ — Preceding unsigned comment added by 32.212.121.214 (talk) 02:22, 27 January 2019 (UTC)

Move
Please move ISO 15924:Latn to Latin script, per the same reason as for the move ISO 15924:Arab to Arabic script, see Talk:Arabic script. Bogdan Nagachop (talk) 11:37, 8 August 2011 (UTC)


 * I assume it will be filled out with some of the non-Roman Latin stuff at Latin alphabet? — kwami (talk) 11:41, 8 August 2011 (UTC)

Poorly written
This needs re-writing, starting with the first sentence (unclear) and the second sentence (misleading). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 211.225.34.68 (talk) 06:25, 22 September 2011 (UTC)


 * In my view this article is not just "poorly written" or "unclear". It is full of fiction. It uses the word "Latin" for something that is not. There is no justification for that. Latin is what the the Romans used in the Roman Empire. Early linguists have called today's European languages as "Vulgar Latin" and rejected them as latin. Also Latin numbers are not 1,2,3 etc they are I,II,III etc. So why make the reader stupid. The article spreads falsehood, does a disservice and harms the reader. It would not be the wikipedia I want to read. ISO makes mistakes, so why does wikipedia has to. Today those letters and numbers are European, so why call them Latin and misinform the reader, confuse the reader or make him stupid? Qzvoswx (talk) 22:49, 12 May 2023 (UTC)
 * Please replace "rejected them as latin" to "rejected them" Qzvoswx (talk) 16:09, 13 May 2023 (UTC)

Combine with Latin alphabet
The split into two articles seems to be artificial, and does not reflect any strong existing terminological boundary. The article would not be too long if we simply appended this article to Latin alphabet, would it? --Victor Yus (talk) 07:30, 2 May 2012 (UTC)


 * It would make a difference is how we're linking from other articles. — kwami (talk) 09:25, 2 May 2012 (UTC)
 * That's a problem that we can solve, I guess, by looking at the links. In fact I know I have been making links to Latin alphabet assuming that article would cover the entire subject rather than half of it, perhaps other editors have done the same, so perhaps in practice the merging would actually eliminate as many link errors as it caused. Victor Yus (talk) 10:28, 2 May 2012 (UTC)


 * We could just not have an article on the Latin alphabet, I suppose, though that feels rather odd. — kwami (talk) 21:47, 2 May 2012 (UTC)

I am not convinced we should merge. E.g. the argument "The split into two articles seems to be artificial" I object to, and there is a boundary. (it is described in the second paragraph of the lead). In short: Latin alphabet is used to write Latin, Latin script has more alphabets (including Latin, Polish, Swedish, Spanish). So for sure they are not the same, and distinguishable. -DePiep (talk) 06:17, 3 May 2012 (UTC)


 * We also make this distinction between the Arabic alphabet and Arabic script. — kwami (talk) 07:28, 3 May 2012 (UTC)
 * It just seems to me that the phrase Latin alphabet, as used on Wikipedia and elsewhere, most often refers to at least a 26-letter alphabet, not the alphabet the ancient Romans used. A quick look at a Google Books search, however, shows that this aplit between alphabet and script terminology may be better established than I had imagined. If so, then what should we call the 26-letter alphabet? Would it be too parochial to call it the English alphabet? Victor Yus (talk) 09:34, 3 May 2012 (UTC)
 * I agree, "Latin alphabet" and "writing Latin" are not exactly equal (e.g. lowercase usage in Roman era). But this is the problem of defining the Latin alphabet, the script definition is not involved. Whatever how it is defined, we should had sources, not OR. One definition, sort of, is ISO basic Latin alphabet. As a script, there is Unicode/ISO Latin characters in Unicode (defined by: character has peroperty Scrip=Latn). I have no scholars definition at hand now. -DePiep (talk) 10:22, 3 May 2012 (UTC)
 * A fairly obvious manifestation of the problem can be seen in the current first sentence of the Latin alphabet article itself. It says "The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today." Which is clearly only true if Latin alphabet is taken to mean the modern, 26+ letter version, and not the Latin Latin alphabet that the article is supposed to be about. (Problem now FIXED, but it still shows how confusing the present arrangement is likely to be.) Victor Yus (talk) 13:38, 3 May 2012 (UTC)
 * Yes. So the problem is: Latin alphabet is badly defined. Still this does not prove "Latin script" equals "Latin alphabet" (by whatever sourced definition). Not by a mile. I'd love to see the lead improved -- with source. But no merge tis way. -DePiep (talk) 01:06, 4 May 2012 (UTC)
 * Glad to add: you edit is an improvement. -DePiep (talk) 01:08, 4 May 2012 (UTC)
 * Thanks. But as to whether Latin script equals Latin alphabet, no, I do not claim it does, but that is not really the point. Clearly both terms are ambiguous (as we admit in our hatnotes): both terms can refer either to a method of writing Latin, or to a writing method derived from the method that was used to write Latin. To assign one term (somewhat arbitrarily) to the former meaning and the other to the latter carries the problems that, firstly, editors of other articles will not be aware of that assignation and will tend to make wrong links (like I have done recently); and secondly that readers of Wikipedia might be (mis)led to conclude that this terminological division is very clearly established in the outside world. (I'm taking a short holiday now, so may have more thoughts when I come back.) Victor Yus (talk) 07:32, 4 May 2012 (UTC)
 * Hi everybody! We have the same issues in it:Wikipedia. Anyway, you can find reference to the distinction script/writing system in authors like Florian Coulmas and Harry Rogers among others (perhaps Petr Sgall also, I'm not sure now). In graphemics this distinction is quite consolidated, just like the distinction between sounds, phones and phonemes in linguistics. Maybe grapheme is more controversial. But this is not the issue here. SynConlanger (talk) 19:49, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

Kazakhstan joined the Latin script
Kazakhstan joined the latin alphabet. Need to become dark green at map. http://www.turkishweekly.net/news/145732/kazakhstan-to-switch-to-latin-script-by-2025-president.html — Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.66.116.189 (talk) 02:31, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

What characters are surrounding the letters under Extensions?
In the Extensions sections, there are two characters surrounding the letters, however they are not printing to screen. Are they some sort of special quotation marks which could be replaced with a more common '"'? LA (T) @ 05:41, 12 May 2013 (UTC) PS. I checked two browsers, Firefox and Chrome.

The latin script is NOT an alphabet
The latin script is not an alphabet. A script is a set of graphs with no phonological content. The same set of graphs (i.e. script) can be used in several writing system. Almost every writing system that uses the latin script is alphabetic, but Cherokee is a syllabary and uses (in part) the latin script. SynConlanger (talk) 13:43, 22 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Agreed; Latin glyphs can be used to create a language-specific alphabet. I wouldn't necessarily call Cherokee syllabary a Latin script, though it does borrow some of the glyphs from it and other scripts.  I added a "see also" link to it from Latin alphabets, and changed the intro of this article. -- Beland (talk) 17:58, 17 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Er, I mean graphemes. -- Beland (talk) 00:41, 18 December 2014 (UTC)

Misleading sentence: "The 26 letters..."
The article currently states in the lead:
 * "The 26 most widespread letters are the letters contained in the ISO basic Latin alphabet."

This is a misleading statement. The 26 letter in the ISO basic Latin alphabet are there because they are the 26 letters of the English alphabet. If it was just based on the number of letters then why 26 and not 25 or 27 or some other arbitrary number. Besides what does the "The 26 most widespread letters" mean? For example if one is writing in Italian then W is not used. So is there a reliable source for this statement that does not involve synthesis? I ask because the "basic Latin alphabet" was an adoption of by the ISO of the ASCII character set which was based on the 26 letters of the English alphabet and some other common characters used on pre-computerisation American typewriters (eg the use of # and not the £ symbol that was found on UK typewriters of the same period). -- PBS (talk) 15:43, 19 May 2015 (UTC)

This is very misleading. There are lots of accents in the latin script, this needs to be fixed. Bunnyisgreat (talk) 02:35, 30 December 2020 (UTC)Bunnyisgreat

Languages
The "languages" element of the writing system Infobox previously said that "most Indo-European languages" are written in Latin, which is of course absurd. As the lead says, most "western and central European languages" are. Half the Slavic languages are written in (some variant of) Cyrillic, Greek and Armenian have their own alphabets, almost all Iranian languages are written with (some variant of) Arabic (though Kurdish is sometimes written with Latin), the Indic languages are all written in variants of the Brahmi script. As for the ancient Indo-European languages, only Latin was written in Latin script. Greek, Hittite, Persian, Sanskrit all had their own scripts.

As for the Turkic languages, Turkish is written in Latin, but most of the others are written in either Cyrillic or Arabic.

The basic problem here is that languages are listed by language family, which is really quite orthogonal to script. After all, Serbo-Croatian and Hindustani are essentially one language (each), but their writing systems are separated by religion (Catholic/Latin vs. Orthodox/Cyrillic and Muslim/Arabic vs. Hindu/Brahmi). This is not an uncommon pattern. Areas converted to Western Christianity write in Latin; areas converted to Islam mostly write in Arabic (with the big exception of Turkish and some former-Soviet areas which converted to Latin or Cyrillic in the 20th century).

I have updated the Infobox. --Macrakis (talk) 21:30, 8 October 2015 (UTC)

Latin Script Numbers
Would someone be able to identify when our modern latin script of numerals came into being. They are obviously very different from the Hindu script of numbers or the later variant when used in Arabia. So when did they finally become the script varient of Hindu numbers that we know them as today? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 108.236.19.133 (talk) 23:12, 7 May 2017 (UTC)
 * Well, they technically aren't considered part of the Latin script, as far as I know, but it seems to mostly have been an ongoing development in Medieval Europe. History of the Hindu–Arabic numeral system, Arabic numerals. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 15:19, 26 October 2020 (UTC)

Hong Kong uses Chinese characters, not just Latin script
The current map is wrong by labeling Hong Kong dark green.



So the description had to be updated. In the future, the map should be revised; or else other editors may object and remove it completely. Just a warning; thank you. Alexkyoung (talk) 02:21, 20 June 2019 (UTC)

"ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ" listed at Redirects for discussion
A discussion is taking place to address the redirect ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ. The discussion will occur at Redirects for discussion/Log/2021 February 12 until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion. Aasim (talk) 02:05, 12 February 2021 (UTC)

Ethiopia
I don't really understand why Ethiopia is grey in the map when Oromo, the most widely used language, which is also official (not like French in Algeria) uses the Latin script. It should be light green because it coexists with others like Ge'ez (Amharic) Ktvptf (talk) 23:58, 26 March 2021 (UTC)

What is an "impure" alphabet?
The infobox calls Latin an "impure" alphabet, a term that isn't defined here or in Alphabet. (I'm familiar with impure abjads, but not impure alphabets.) Since it apparently originated in a 2017 edit by an IP user,, I'm inclined to think it's nonsense, but it's survived an awfully long time if that's the case. -- Perey (talk) 05:38, 8 October 2021 (UTC)

Phoenician
The Greek alphabet descends from Phoenician which the leads fails to mention. Should I add it? AlexBachmann (talk) 22:18, 30 May 2023 (UTC)


 * Of what relevance is that to the article? The article is about the Latin alphabet, not the Greek alphabet. Khirurg (talk) 22:40, 30 May 2023 (UTC)
 * For you: The lead says: "derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae, in southern Italy". It fails to mention a relevant previous writing system. AlexBachmann (talk) 23:04, 30 May 2023 (UTC)
 * You didn't answer my question. This article is about the Latin script, not the Greek one. I have read the lead by the way, there is no need to repeat it here. Khirurg (talk) 23:39, 30 May 2023 (UTC)
 * So you're saying that I should remove that part? I don't need to answer any questions. That's what the lead says. It says that it delivers from Greek but fails to name the important ancestor. AlexBachmann (talk) 12:35, 31 May 2023 (UTC)
 * So are you going to go around wikipedia and in every article in which the Greek alphabet is mentioned you will also mention that is derived from the Phoenician alphabet? Btw you still haven't answered my question of why is it relevant here? Khirurg (talk) 15:27, 31 May 2023 (UTC)
 * In these articles we mention the one specific script that had direct influence on each alphabet. The ultimate ancestor of all scripts, after all, is hieroglyphics. If the reader wants to read further, the complete history of the scripts/alphabets is included in the infobox. Piccco (talk) 20:18, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

Difference between: Latin script, Latin alphabet, Latin-script alphabet
The lead of all three articles should make it clear what is the difference between those three concepts. Right now this is not clear. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 02:41, 2 January 2024 (UTC)