The Old Italic alphabets clearly derive from the Greek alphabet, specifically from the Euboean variant used in the Euboean Greek colonies of Ischia and Cumae in the Bay of Naples in the 8th century BC. The Etruscans were the leading civilization of Italy in that period, and it is assumed that the other Old Italic scripts were derived from theirs – although some of them, including the Latin alphabet, retained certain Greek letters that the Etruscans themselves dropped at a rather early stage. The Old Italic alphabets were used for various different languages, which included some Indo-European ones and some non-Indo-European ones.
The following table shows the ancient Italic scripts that are presumed to be related to the Etruscan alphabet. Symbols that are assumed to be correspondent are placed on the same column. Many symbols occur with two or more variant forms in the same script; only one variant is shown here. The notations ' and ' indicate that the shapes shown were used when writing right-to-left and left-to-right, respectively. For more information, such as variant shapes and the prevalent writing direction of each script, see the corresponding language article. Warning: For the languages marked the appearance of the "Letters" in the table is whatever one's browser's Unicode font shows for the corresponding code points in the Old Italic Unicode block. The same code point represents different symbol shapes in different languages; therefore, to display those glyph images properly one needs to use a Unicode font specific to that language.
The Nucerian alphabet is based on inscriptions found in southern Italy. It is attested only between the 6th and the 5th century BC. The most important sign is the /S/, shaped like a fir tree or a fish bone, and possibly a derivation from the Phoenician alphabet. Missing from the above table:
21 of the 26 archaic Etruscan letters were adopted for Old Latin from the 7th century BC, either directly from the Cumae alphabet, or via archaic Etruscan forms, compared to the classical Etruscan alphabet retaining B, D, K, O, Q, X but dropping Θ, Ś, Φ, Ψ, and F.
South Picene alphabet
The South Picene alphabet, known from the 6th century BC, is most like the southern Etruscan alphabet in that it uses Q for /k/ and K for /g/. is a reduced and is a reduced, used for.
Unicode
The Old Italic alphabets were unified and added to the Unicode Standard in March, 2001 with the release of version 3.1. The Unicode block for Old Italic is U+10300-U+1032F without specification of a particular alphabet. Writing direction varies based on the language and even the time period. For simplicity most scholars use left-to-right and this is the Unicode default direction for the Old Italic block. For this reason, the glyphs in the code chart are shown with left-to-right orientation.
