I’m sure this won’t be a total rehash of U. I mean, these letters
are nothing alike.
First, go look at the alphabet gif and you’ll see that there was no V before early Latin script evolved into
modern. That’s because the symbol V was interchangeable with U—basically, some
people wrote the letter round, some people wrote it pointed. But everyone pronounced it U. As for the sound V…they wrote that using F. When they wanted to use the F sound, they paired F with H, similar to how we
use sh and th. Until they made their own symbol for it, a lost glyph that looks
like an 8.
Okay, so we know V was U, so let’s look more at the history
of the symbol. Early Latin sometimes wrote U as a Y—well,
there was no Y then, so it’s not like it mattered. Etruscan did the same thing,
using Y and V interchangeably for
the U sound. The Greek upsilon has a lowercase that looks like a cross between
a v and a u (υ), while the uppercase just looks like Y (the Y sound was under its domain, so it makes sense). Before that was the Phoenicianscript, but since they only
used consonants, there was no symbol for V. When the Greeks first adapted the alphabet,
they used the Phoenician waw symbol, which looked like a Y and sounded like a W, to create their V.
TL;DR: Everyone makes up their own sound for letters. It’s a
miracle we can communicate at all.
Sources
Very interesting. I remember coming across ancient alphabets in historical texts and noticing discrepancies.
ReplyDeleteThat's why I just call everyone "Bob."
ReplyDeleteIt is a miracle we can all communicate.
ReplyDeleteI remember seeing that on the odd bit of Roman architecture.
ReplyDeleteSo, we'll just throw a letter out there. Use whatever pronunciation you want. Doesn't matter really.
ReplyDelete