Latin alphabet

views updated

Latin alphabet One of several character sets based on the letters used for writing Latin. (In contrast with Latin, these alphabets distinguish I from J, and U from V.) They, along with sets in Cyrillic, Arabic, Greek, and Hebrew, are included in ISO 8859: Information Processing – 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets. Each Latin alphabet contains the ASCII character set, and includes additional characters with diacritical marks for various languages. Table 1 shows the code table for Latin alphabet No. 1, which covers Danish, Dutch, English, Faroese, Finnish, French, German, Icelandic, Irish, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish; Table 2 shows the distribution of languages within Latin alphabets Nos. 1–5.

More From encyclopedia.com