The Modern Alphabet- more formally know as the modern Latin alphabet is composed of 52 upper and lowercase letters (26 of each). The lowercase letters are developed from cursive versions of the uppercase letters. Then come 10 numerals (0-9), which can be used to form any number. The alphabet also consists of symbols, punctuation marks and accents that are used for other languages.
Not all alphabets are made up the same, some are missing letters and some have added letters. For example the Spanish have 30 letterers because of addition of ñ, ll, ch, and rr whereas some languages are missing letters such as Italian. The Italian alphabet is composed of 21 letters, and lacks “J”,”k”,”w”, and “y”.Accents and stresses have come into the alphabet to provide visual guides to the pronunciation of letters and words by giving an example of how each letter should sound. Common accents are ones such as Acute, circumflex, breve, grave, umlaut, and the tilde. For example the tilde over a letter indicates that a more nasal pronunciation is required. And the circumflex indicates that a vowel has a long sound.
When it comes to numbers they are derived from Arabic characters. It was this adoption that was the birth of “0”. It didn’t commonly become used until the renaissance period. Numbers, which at the time were letters, were soon modified and simplified into Roman numerals. This was to simplify the writing of infinite length numbers with much more ease. For example m = 1,000. With math, Roman Numerals were also not the easiest to use whereas the Latin number system worked easily.
How many letters are included in the modern Latin alphabet?
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/latin.htm#modern
The Fundamentals of typography
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