Scribal abbreviation by "contraction" and was mostly a Christian usage for sacred words, Nomina Sacra; non-Christian sigla usage usually limited the number of letters the abbreviation comprised and omitted no intermediate letter. One practice was rendering an overused, formulaic phrase only as a siglum: DM for "Dis Manibus" ("Dedicated to the Manes"); IHS from the first three letters of "ΙΗΣΟΥΣ"; and RIP for "requiescat in pace" ("Rest in Peace") because the long-form written usage of the abbreviated phrase, by itself, was rare. According to Trabe, these abbreviations are not really meant to lighten the burden of the scribe but rather to shroud
Traditional English pronunciation of Latin listed summarily below. The full set of consonantal phonemes for A-L is almost identical to that of English, lacking only . Environments that condition the appearance of some of these phonemes are listed below: The change of intervocalic to is common but not universal. Voicing is more common in Latin than in Greek words, and never occurs in the common Greek ending "-sis", where "s" is always voiceless: "basis, crisis, genesis". The most common type of phonemic change in A-L is palatalization. A-L reflects the results of no less than four palatalization processes. The first of these occurred in Late