Beltonian/Alphabet

The Beltonian alphabet is an alphabet which is used to write the Beltonian and Lennodese languages. Having evolved from the Greek alphabet under significant influence of the Latin alphabet, the alphabet has been used to write the Beltonian language since the 9th century, and was introduced around the same time to Lennodos.

Adoption of the Greek alphabet in Old Beltonian
Old Beltonian was written in multiple alphabets before a modified version of the Greek alphabet was standardized. The earliest was Beltonian Runes, followed by Latin. From the 6th to 8th centuries, the official alphabet changed three times between Latin and Greek, paralleling the struggle between the Western and Eastern Roman Empires for hegemony over Beltonia. In 763, a modified version of the Greek alphabet was adopted.

The 763 alphabet consisted of the same 24 letters as the Classical (and subsequent) Greek alphabets, plus four new additions. Three were imported from Latin (although be was imported to represent a different sound and koppa referenced an archaic Greek letter), while menoides came from an alternative form of sigma (lunate sigma). At the insistence of the church, omega was kept as the last letter of the alphabet and the new letters were slotted in before it. Vowels could be marked with an acute accent and iota could also instead be marked with a diaeresis. The acute accent indicated stressed, and in the case of epsilon affected its pronunciation. The diaeresis was used to mark diphthongs.

Various vowel digraphs and trigraphs were used to indicate /æ/, /u/ and diphthongs. Complicating matters was that the alphabet inherited some inconsistencies from Greek. For example, using  to represent /oi/ would have been intuitive, but in the contemporary Greek usage it represented /y/ (it had formerly represented that diphthong in Ancient Greek, but the pronunciation had shifted to /y/). Therefore it represented /i/ in Greek borrowings, while <ΩI> was used for /oi/.

The ,  and  digraphs were used for Greek borrowings and had the same variable pronunciation. They respectively were /ɑf/, /ef/ and /ef/ before voiceless consonants. Before voiced consonants, the /f/ became a /v/, before /n/ it became /m/ and before /m/ it was dropped.

Classical Beltonian alphabet
During the era of Classical Beltonian, the alphabet attained its present form. The first change was the addition of two further vowels: aite and u. The former's name came from the Latin phrase A et E ("A and E"). The second development was the development of a bicameral script.

Until the Late Middle Ages, the Greek and Latin alphabets did not distinguish between upper- and lower-case letters. The standard alphabets of both the Greek and Latin alphabets would be recognized today as upper-case letters. However, both languages had alternative alphabets that were used for writing, which allowed rapid writing and had more curly letters, reducing the chance of a papyrus or parchment writing surface being torn. Within Beltonia, there were lower-case alphabets in use, some which were very similar to Greek, while others were more influenced by Latin. By the Late Middle Ages, the language became standardized as a bicameral script with a more Latin-influenced set of lower-case letters.