Abstract

The name of letters, derived from Latin, are not exactly the same in the various Romance languages. The study of references to the name of letters made by grammarians and lexicographers reveals the continuity of forms going back to the origins of language and still remembered, although occasionally, at the beginning of the 20th century: a, be, ce, de, e, ef; ge, hac, i, jota, ka, el, em, en, o, pe, qu, er, es, te, u, ve, xeix, y grega, i tzeta. However, in the 19th century, Castilians gradually substituted these names, and consequently, the codification of Catalan by Pompeu Fabra and the Institut d'Estudis Catalans was carried out with disregard to its own grammatical tradition.