An abecedarium is an inscription consisting of the letters of the alphabet in order. Typically, abecedaria are practice exercises. Inscriptions are words or letters written, engraved, painted, or otherwise traced on a surface and can appear in contexts both small and monumental. ... {otheruses}} An alphabet is a complete standardiaed set of letters — basic written symbols — each of which roughly represents a phoneme of a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it may have been in the past. ...

Some abecedaria include obsolete letters which are not otherwise attested in inscriptions. For example, abecedaria in the Etruscan alphabet from Marsiliana include the letters B, D, and O, which indicate sounds not present in the Etruscan language and are therefore not found in Etruscan inscriptions. Note: This article contains special characters. ... Etruscan was a language spoken and written in the ancient region of Etruria (current Tuscany) and in parts of what are now Lombardy, Veneto, and Emilia-Romagna (where the Etruscans were displaced by Gauls), in Italy. ...

At, or near, the beginning of the Christian era, the Latin alphabet had already undergone its principal changes, and had become a fixed and definite system. The Greek alphabet, moreover, with certain slight modifications, was becoming closely assimilated to the Latin. Towards the eighth century of Rome, the letters assumed their artistic forms and lost their older, narrower ones. Nor have the three letters added by the Emperor Claudius ever been found in use in Christian inscriptions. The letters themselves, it may be said, fell into disuse at the death of the Emperor in question. The alphabet, however, employed for monumental inscriptions differed so completely from the cursive as to make it wholly impossible to mistake the one for the other. The uncial, occurring very rarely on sculptured monuments, and reserved for writing, did not make its appearance before the fourth century. The number of Christian objects bearing the Abecedaria, with the exception of two vases found at Carthage, is extremely limited. On the other hand, those of heathen origin are more plentiful, and include certain tablets used by stone-cutters apprentices while learning their trade. Stones have also been found in the catacombs, bearing the symbols A, B, C, etc. These are arranged, sometimes, in combinations which have puzzled the sagacity of scholars. One such, found in the cemetery of St. Alexander, in the Via Nomentana, is inscribed as follows: The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. ... Note: This article contains special characters. ... For other uses, see Claudius (disambiguation). ... A Monumental Inscription is an inscription, typically carved in stone, on a grave marker or memorial plaque. ... Cursive is any style of handwriting in which all the letters in a word are connected, making a word one single (complicated) stroke. ... The Book of Kells, c. ... An Italian Futurist sculpture by Umberto Boccioni at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City (MoMA). ... A map of the central Mediterranean Sea, showing the location of Carthage (near modern Tunis). ... The word catacomb comes from Greek kata kumbas (L. ad catacumbas), near the low place and originally it meant a certain burial district in Rome. ...

 AXBVCTESDR . . . . . .BCCEECHI EQGPH. . . .M MNOPQ RSTVXYZ 

This represents, in all probability, a schoolperson's task, which may be compared with a denarius of L. Cassius Caecinianus, whereon the inscription runs thus: First row : c. ...

 AX, BV, CT, DS, ER, FQ, GP, HO, IN, KM 

It is to Jerome that we owe an explanation of this curious trifle. He tells us that, in order to train the memory of young children, they were made to learn the alphabet in a double form, joining A to X, and so on with the other letters. A stone found at Rome in 1877, and dating from the sixth or seventh century, seems to have been used in a school, as a model for learning the alphabet, and, points, incidentally, to the long continuance of old methods of teaching. , by Albrecht Dürer Jerome (ca. ... 1877 was a common year starting on Monday (see link for calendar). ... American high school students in a school A school is most commonly a place designated for learning. ...

This article incorporates text from the public domain Catholic Encyclopedia. The public domain comprises the body of all creative works and other knowledge—writing, artwork, music, science, inventions, and others—in which no person or organization has any proprietary interest. ... The Catholic Encyclopedia (also referred to as the Old Catholic Encyclopedia today) is an English-language encyclopedia published in 1913 by the The Encyclopedia Press, designed to give authoritative information on the entire cycle of Catholic interests, action and doctrine. // History The writing of the encyclopedia began on January 11...