Claudian letters

Claudian letters were developed by, and named after, the Roman Emperor Claudius (reigned 41–54). He introduced three new letters: Image File history File links Claudian_letters. ... Image File history File links Claudian_letters. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... For other persons named Claudius, see Claudius (disambiguation). ... Events January 24 - Roman Emperor Gaius Caesar (Caligula), known for his eccentricity and cruel despotism, is assassinated by his disgruntled Praetorian Guards. ... Events October 13 - Roman Empire emperor Claudius dies after being poisoned by Agrippina, his wife and niece. ...

• a reversed C (antisigma) to replace BS and PS, much like X stood in for CS and GS, and inspired by the Greek Psi. The appearance of this letter is disputed, however, since no inscription bearing it has been found. It may have been represented by two C's back to back, or some other symbol.
• a turned F (digamma inversum) to represent consonantal U (W/V), possibly inspired by the Greek Digamma.
• a half H to represent the sound of Greek Upsilon, a vowel sound between U and I (y) in Latin words such as Olympicus), possibly inspired by an early form of the spiritus asper.

These letters were used to a small extent on public inscriptions dating from his 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. Claudius may have been inspired to introduce these changes by a comment his mother Antonia made to him in his youth, to the effect that he would be as unlikely to become emperor as he would be able to change the alphabet. 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, using arguments preserved in the historian Tacitus's account of his reign. In time, the letter Y was added to the Latin alphabet, filling the role of the broken "H" which Claudius had promulgated. Antisigma, a reversed lunate sigma, encoded at U+03FD (Ͻ) may represent an editorial sign introduced by Aristarchus of Samothrace, see Sigma. ... Psi has multiple meanings: Psi (letter) (Ψ, ψ) of the Greek alphabet Psi (Cyrillic) (Ñ°, ѱ), letter of the early Cyrillic alphabet, adopted from Greek Psi (parapsychology) Psi (instant messaging client), a popular Jabber client program J/ψ particle, a subatomic particle Wavefunction in Quantum Mechanics, ψ In mathematics, Ψ is used to denote the angle between... Look up W, w in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Look up V, v in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Digamma (upper case , lower case ) is an archaic letter of the Greek alphabet, used primarily as a Greek numeral. ... Upsilon (upper case , lower case ) is the 20th letter of the Greek alphabet. ... Vowels See also: IPA, Consonants Near‑close Close‑mid Mid Open‑mid Near‑open Open Where symbols appear in pairs, the one to the right represents a rounded vowel. ... The spiritus asper (rough breathing) or dasy pneuma (Greek: dasu, δασύ) is a diacritical mark used in Greek. ... Julia Antonia Cretica Minor (the younger) (31 January 36 BC - September/October 37 AD) or Antonia the Younger or simply known as Antonia. ... Appius Claudius Caecus (Appius Claudius the Blind, c. ... Censor was the title of two magistrates of high rank in the Roman Republic. ... Gaius Cornelius Tacitus Publius (or Gaius) Cornelius Tacitus (c. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ...

The reversed C is also used as a variant Roman numeral. Roman numerals are a numeral system originating in ancient Rome, adapted from Etruscan numerals. ...

Support for the letters was added in the most recent version of Unicode, version 5.0.0. The letters are encoded as follows: Unicode is an industry standard allowing computers to consistently represent and manipulate text expressed in any of the worlds writing systems. ...

Further reading

• Oliver, Revilo P. (1949). "The Claudian Letter Ⱶ". American Journal of Archaeology 53: 249-257. DOI:10.2307/500662. 
• Ryan, F. X. (1993). "Some Observations on the Censorship of Claudius and Vitellius, A.D. 47-48". American Journal of Philology 114 (4): 611-618. DOI:10.2307/295428. 

A digital object identifier (or DOI) is a standard for persistently identifying a piece of intellectual property on a digital network and associating it with related data, the metadata, in a structured extensible way. ... A digital object identifier (or DOI) is a standard for persistently identifying a piece of intellectual property on a digital network and associating it with related data, the metadata, in a structured extensible way. ...

References

• Suetonius pass, Loeb Classical Library edition, 1913‑1914, English translation is by J. C. Rolfe. From LacusCurtius