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Writing systems typically satisfy three criteria. Firstly, the writing must have some purpose or meaning to it, and a point must be communicated by the text. Secondly, writing systems make use of specific symbols which may be recorded on some writing medium. Thirdly, the symbols used in writing generally correspond to elements of spoken ...
Writing systems are used to record human language, and may be classified according to certain common features. The usual name of the script is given first; the name of the languages in which the script is written follows (in brackets), particularly in the case where the language name differs from the script name.
Writing has been invented independently multiple times in human history. The first writing systems emerged during the Early Bronze Age, with the cuneiform writing system used to write Sumerian generally considered to be the earliest true writing, closely followed by the Egyptian hieroglyphs.
The Old Italic scripts are a family of 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 was the immediate ancestor of the Latin alphabet used by more than 100 languages today, including English .
The Latin script originated in archaic antiquity in the Latium region in central Italy.It is generally held that the Latins, one of many ancient Italic tribes, adopted the western variant of the Greek alphabet in the 7th century BCE [1] from Cumae, a Greek colony in southern Italy – making the early Latin alphabet one among several Old Italic scripts emerging at the time.
Such systems emerged from earlier traditions of symbol systems in the early Neolithic, as early as the 7th millennium BC in China and southeastern Europe. They used ideographic or early mnemonic symbols or both to represent a limited number of concepts, in contrast to true writing systems , which record the language of the writer.
Latin script is the basis for the largest number of alphabets of any writing system [1] and is the most widely adopted writing system in the world. Latin script is used as the standard method of writing the languages of Western and Central Europe, most of sub-Saharan Africa, the Americas, and Oceania, as well as many languages in other parts of ...
In "old style" text figures, numerals 0, 1 and 2 are x-height; numerals 6 and 8 have bowls within x-height, plus ascenders; numerals 3, 5, 7 and 9 have descenders from x-height, with 3 resembling ʒ; and the numeral 4 extends a short distance both up and down from x-height. Old-style numerals are often used by British presses.