The Italian Language

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The Latin Alphabet

The alphabet used by Classical Latin was:

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

Lower case was non-existent. This was only introduced in Carolingian times, to make reading easier.

The Latin alphabet consisted of 5 vowels

A E I O U

These consonants doubled as 10 sounds, as each vowel could be pronounced either long or short:

Long a, short a, long e and short e and so forth.

and a number of consonants which varied in time. A basic list would be:

B C D F G H L M P Q R S T

Contrary most Romance languages, C and G were always hard.

H was not silent.

S was never voiced. Spanish has retained (or recovered) this characteristic, especially in Latin-American Spanish, where soft c, s and z all sound like unvoiced s.