One of the descedants of the Greek alphabet was the Etruscan alphabet. The earliest known example of the Roman alphabet was an inscription on a gold brooch in the 6th century. Roman conquests lead to the use of the Latin alphabet as the basic alphabet of all languages of western Europe.
The Romans originally took 21 of the Greek and Etruscan letters as their own. They would represent the sounds of their language. The Greek letters upsilon (Y) and zeta (Z) were originally dropped out of the Latin language. Since the Romans valued the Greek culture highly, they borrowed some Greek words which used "Y" and "Z". Because of this, these letters were eventually added to the alphabet. During the Middle Ages, "J" was a variant of "I" and "U" was a variant of "V". They acheived the status of separate letters during the Renaissance. In northern Europe, when "uu" or "vv" occurred, they eventually became the letter "w". This provided the 26 letters of the Roman alphabet used for modern English.
