Claudian letters

Ↄ or /X () to replace BS and PS , much as X stood in for CS and GS . The shape of this letter is disputed, however, since no inscription bearing it has been found. Franz Bücheler identified it with the variant Roman numeral Ↄ, but 20th-century philologists, working from copies of Priscian's books, believe it to instead resemble two linked Cs (Ↄ+Ϲ), which was a preexisting variant of Greek sigma, and easily mistaken for X by later writers. Revilo P. Oliver argued that Claudius would have based this letter upon the Arcadian variant of psi or . As noted, no examples of this letter from the time have been discovered; its usage must be guessed at. It would probably replace the PS or BS sequence in Latin words, especially those with Greek etymology, such as (), (), (), or (). == (Ⅎ) ==

Ⅎ, a turned F or digamma () to be used instead of the letter V when denoting the consonantal phoneme or . ==Half H (Ⱶ) ==

Ⱶ, a half H, probably had the name in harmony with other vowels. The value of this letter is unclear, but it may have represented the so-called , a short vowel sound, likely , but it could have also been . It was used before labial consonants in Latin words such as and . The letter was later used as a variant of in inscriptions for short Greek upsilon (as in ). It may have disappeared because the itself disappeared from spoken language. ==Usage==

These letters were used to a small extent on public inscriptions dating from Claudius' reign, but their use was abandoned after his death. Their forms were probably chosen to ease the transition, as they could be made from templates for existing letters. He may have been inspired by his ancestor Appius Claudius the Censor, who made earlier changes to the Latin alphabet. Claudius did indeed introduce his letters during his own term as censor (47–48), using arguments preserved in the historian Tacitus' account of his reign, although the original proclamation is no longer extant. Suetonius said of Claudius' letters: Assuming that the letters were added at the end of the alphabet, just like Y and Z were, and that the order of these 3 letters does not matter, the Latin alphabet with these letters would look like this: Support for the letters was added in version 5.0.0 of Unicode. Although these letters, as all Latin letters in antiquity, originally occurred only in capital form, lowercase forms were introduced to meet Unicode casing requirements. The minuscule form for the turned F was designed as a turned small capital F and should not be confused with the IPA symbol representing a voiced palatal stop. The letters are encoded as follows: ==See also==