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The official Portuguese alphabet consists of the letters of the Latin alphabet minus K, W, and Y:- A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, L, MM is the thirteenth letter of the Latin alphabet. History The letter M represents the bilabial nasal consonant sound [m] in Classical languages as well as the modern languages. It derives its shape from the Greek Μ or μ. Semitic Mem originally pictu, NN is the fourteenth letter of the modern Latin alphabet. Semitic Nun was probably the picture of a snake; the sound value of the letter was /n/ as in Greek, Etruscan, Latin and all modern languages. Greek name: N, Ny. November represents the letter N in t, OO is the fifteenth letter of the Latin alphabet. In Greek (Omikron), Etruscan and Latin O stood for the vowel /o/. Although Semitic 'Ajin was used in some alphabets to transcribe [o], the sound value was usually consonantic: [?/] (as the Arabic letter cal, PP is the 16th letter of the Latin alphabet. Semitic Pe (mouth) as well as Greek Π or π ( Pi) and the Etruscan and Latin letters that developed from the former alphabet all symbolized /p/, a plosive, unvoiced consonant. Those who speak Arabic usually, QQ is the 17th letter of the Latin alphabet. The Semitic sound value of Qop was /q/. In Greek this sign (called Qoppa in Greek) probably came to represent several labial plosives, among them /k_w/ and /k_w_h/. These sounds changed to /p/ and /p_h/ respecti, RR is the eighteenth letter of the Latin alphabet. Semitic ReS (the head) developed into Greek (Ro). The sound value /r/ however was maintained in Greek as well as Etruscan and Latin. The finishing stroke was added to the Greek Rho to distinguish it from a, SS is the nineteenth letter in the modern Latin alphabet. Semitic Šin (bow) was pronounced as /S/ as the modern English digraph SH. In Greek, there was only one phoneme /s/ and no /S/, so Greek σιγμα ( sigma) came to repres, TT is the twentieth letter of the modern Latin alphabet. Taw was the last letter of the Western Semitic alphabet and of the Hebrew alphabet. The sound value of Semitic Taw, Greek alphabet T (Tau), and Etruscan alphabet and Latin T was /t/. Tango represents, U, V, X, Z
Although not found in vernacular terms, the letters K, W, and Y are still used for proper names and Portuguese words derived from them. Portuguese also uses several digraphs and diacritics, described below.
1 Introduction
The history of the Portuguese script began in the 12th century, when scribes in the Western Iberian peninsula started using the local vernacular in documents, in place of Latin. The script evolved naturally until the close of the 19th century, the golden age of Portuguese literature. At about that time the national Academias de Letras ("Literary Academies") were created in Brazil and Portugal, and legally empowered to standardize orthography.
Today, Portuguese orthography is defined by national laws and international treaties, which are binding for most administrative and educational uses. The orthography underwent a major reform around 1940, when a large fraction of the words had their spelling radically simplified. A second reform around 1990 had much smaller impact.
The general result of those reforms was to make Portuguese orthography — which until 1940s has been determined chiefly by etymology — much closer to a phonetic writing system. However, its rules are still rather complex and non-algorithmic, and still somewhat based on etymology. Thus, spelling and pronunciation are still partly determined by tradition, on a word by word basis. In particular, many letters have two or more phonetic values ("X" has four), and many sounds can be written in more than one way.
