Re: [tied] Re: vulgar Latin?

----- Original Message -----
From: "Brian M. Scott" <BMScott@...>
To: "g" <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Thursday, May 01, 2003 5:04 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] Re: vulgar Latin?



> Medieval <u> and <v> were merely orthographic variants, so this does not represent any confusion of sounds. In fact one of the more common medieval orthographic conventions was to use <v> initially and <u> everywhere else.

In Late Middle English <w> became the most common spelling for /w/ (beside <u ~ v> and <uu>), while <u ~ v> could stand for either /u/ or /v/ (the latter a newly introduced phoneme). It's clear that <w> was just a way of writing <vv>: sometimes the first half of "double V" counted as consonantal (= /w/) and the second as vocalic (= /u/), e.g. 'wood' could be spelt <wde> ("and springþ þe wde nu") beside <uud>, <wode>, <vode> and other variants.

English writers and printers began to distinguish <v> (/v/) from <u> (any vowel that can be so spelt) with any consistency rather about 1600 (at least partly in imitation of Louis Elzevir's influential conventions), and even then the two characters continued for a long time to be treated as allographs (unordedered alphabetically with respect to each other).

The story of <i> and <j> is somewhat similar, except that <j> was a very late invention in comparison with <v>. <iust> was the spelling of <just> until the 17th c.

Piotr