Getting close to the end now!
If you look at the alphabet gif, you’ll see that in early forms of Latin writing, the letter U looks
surprisingly like Y and V. This is because before then, we didn’t have V as a sound, so our writing
system ancestors Etruscan and Greek all have V and all pronounce it U (for
the V sound, they used F because that’s how it used to be pronounced). Of
course, before Greek, there’s Phoenician and Proto Sinaitic, neither of which
have a U because they’re abjads and don’t use vowels.
TL;DR: (as if this could get any briefer) U
looked like V, when it actually existed, because the V sound was just F.
I’m sure none of this will be repeated when I do the letter
V {crosses fingers}.
Sources
And U
Not using vowels would be difficult.
ReplyDeleteMaybe you should go write for DC comics...
ReplyDeleteI remember seeing the absense of a U on certain Roman sites in terms of letters. I didn't quite know the reason why.
ReplyDeleteLetter evolution is weird.
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