The Old EnglishLatin alphabet —though it had no standard orthography—generally consisted of 24 letters, and was used for writing Old English from the 8th to the 12thcenturies. Of these letters, 20 were directly adopted from the Latin alphabet, two were modified Latin letters, and two developed from the runic alphabet. The letters K, Q, and Z were not in the spelling of native English words. The first column of the table shows the letters of the Old English Latin alphabet, and the second column their modern equivalents. Old English was first written in runes but shifted to a half-uncial script of the Latin alphabet introduced by Irish Christian missionaries from around the 8th century. This was replaced by Insular script, a cursive and pointed version of the half-uncial script. This was used until the end of the 12th century when continentalCarolingian minuscule replaced the insular, along with a shift in spelling conventions toward the Old French alphabet, leading to Middle English. The letter ðæt was an alteration of Latin, and the runic lettersthorn and wynn are borrowings from futhorc. Also used was a symbol for the conjunctionand, a character similar to the number seven, and a symbol for the relative pronounþæt, a thorn with a crossbar through the ascender. Macrons over vowels were rarely used to indicate long vowels. Also used occasionally were abbreviations for following ms or ns. A number of changes are traditionally made in published modern editions of the original Old English manuscripts. Some of these conventions include the introduction of punctuation and the substitutions of symbols. The symbols,,,, are used in modern editions, although their shapes in the insular script are considerably different. The long s is replaced by its modern counterpart. Insular g is usually replaced by its modern counterpart . The /w/ phoneme was occasionally spelled in Old English manuscripts, but ƿ was more common. The consistent use of w developed in the early Middle English period, during the 12th to 13th centuries. Additionally, modern manuscripts often distinguish between a velar and palatal and with diacritic dots above the putative palatals:, . The wynn'' symbol is usually replaced by. Many scholarly works use only and not . Macrons are usually found in modern editions to indicate putative long vowels, while they are usually lacking in the originals. In older printed editions of Old English works, an acute accentmark was used to maintain cohesion between Old English and Old Norse printing.
