Early Alphabets and the Roman Letterform
Overview
An alphabet is a standard set of letters used to write one or more languages. The letters of an alphabet indicate the sounds of the spoken language it represents. It has separate glyphs for individual sounds, rather than larger units, like syllables or words.
A true alphabet has letters for the vowels of a language as well as the consonants. Alphabets are usually associated with a standard ordering of their letters, making them useful for organization methods like sorting words in alphabetical order.
“The Greeks stabilized the alphabet, the Romans polished it off.”
Timeline
Proto-writing
40,000 BC – 3,000 BC
Cuneiform
3,000 BC – 1,000 BC
Hieroglyphics
2,700 BC
Phoenician Alphabet
1,000 BC
Greek Alphabet
800 BC
Latin Alphabet
200 BC
Resources
Youtube description: For the past 25 years, one typeface has dominated Hollywood typography: Trajan. It's everywhere, from Shakespearean epic classics like Titus to gory modern flicks like The Human Centipede. It was even the official typeface of the Academy Awards for a while.