Noto Serif is a modulated (“serif”) design for texts in the Latin, Cyrillic and Greek scripts, also suitable as the complementary font for other script-specific Noto Serif fonts.
Noto Serif has italic styles, multiple weights and widths, contains 3,256 glyphs, 24 OpenType features, and supports 2,840 characters from 30 Unicode blocks: Latin Extended Additional, Cyrillic, Greek Extended, Latin Extended-B, Latin Extended-D, Latin Extended-A, Phonetic Extensions, Greek and Coptic, Combining Diacritical Marks, IPA Extensions, Cyrillic Extended-B, Latin-1 Supplement, General Punctuation, Basic Latin, Supplemental Punctuation, Spacing Modifier Letters, Letterlike Symbols, Phonetic Extensions Supplement, Combining Diacritical Marks Supplement, Latin Extended-E, Cyrillic Supplement, Currency Symbols, Latin Extended-C, Cyrillic Extended-A, Modifier Tone Letters, Superscripts and Subscripts, Combining Diacritical Marks Extended, Combining Half Marks, Cyrillic Extended-C, Alphabetic Presentation Forms.
Latin (Roman) is a European bicameral alphabet, written left-to-right. The most popular writing system in the world. Used for over 3,000 languages including Latin and Romance languages (Italian, French, Portuguese, Spanish and Romanian), Germanic languages (English, Dutch, German, Nordic languages), Finnish, Malaysian, Indonesian, Filipino, Visayan languages, Turkish, Azerbaijani, Polish, Somali, Vietnamese, and many others. Derived from Western Greek, attested in Rome in the 7th century BCE. In the common era, numerous European languages adopted the Latin script along with Western Christian religion, the script disseminated further with European colonization of the Americas, Australia, parts of Asia, Africa and the Pacific. New letters, ligatures and diacritical marks were gradually added to represent the sounds of various languages. Read more on ScriptSource, Unicode, Wikipedia, Wiktionary, r12a.
Cyrillic is a bicameral alphabet originating in Europe, written left-to-right (250 million users). Used for various languages across Eurasia and is used as the national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic and Iranic-speaking countries in Southeastern Europe, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia, North Asia and East Asia, including Russian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbian, Ukrainian, Uzbek, Azerbaijani, Kazakh, Tajik, Kyrgyz, Bashkort, Chechen, Chuvash, Avar, Dargwa, Kabardian, Karakalpak, Kumyk, Lezgi, Ossetic, Pontic, Yakut, Buriat and many others. Created in the 9th century. Traditionally attributed to Saint Cyril, a monk from Thessaloniki working in Bulgaria, after earlier creation of the Glagolitic script. Sometimes attributed to Clement of Ohrid, a student of Saint Cyril’s. Initially used for Old Church Slavonic. Reformed in 1708 by Russian tsar Peter the Great. Extended by the Soviet Union in the 20th century to write over 50 languages throughout Eastern Europe and Asia (some of those languages switched to Latin after 1991). Read more on ScriptSource, Unicode, Wikipedia, Wiktionary, r12a.
Greek (Ελληνικά) is a European bicameral alphabet, written left-to-right (11 million users). Used to write the Greek language since the 8th century BCE. Also used to write other languages like Urum, Albanian Tosk, and Balkan Gagauz Turkish. Some symbols are also used in scientific notation. Derived from Phoenician. First “true alphabet”, with distinct letters for consonants and vowels. Standardized in the 4th century BCE by Eucleides. Has 24 letters. Some letter variants (sigma: σ/ς) have positional significance in the Greek language, other variants only differ in meaning in scientific notation (e.g. pi: π/ϖ). The Greek language used to be written in polytonic spelling, with three accents on vowels. In 1982, Greece introduced monotonic spelling with a single diacritic. Needs software support for complex text layout (shaping). Read more on ScriptSource, Unicode, Wikipedia, Wiktionary, r12a.