Re: "UU" specimen? (Was: Re: RE: Mayan numerals)

Marco Cimarosti scripsit:

> See plenty lowercase "uu"'s here:
>
> http://www.fh-augsburg.de/~harsch/germanica/Chronologie/09Jh/Heliand/hel_hf0
> 1.html
>
> The uppercase form seems to be "Uu" (see line 85). That's quite strange: I
> would have expected "Vu" in a document of that age.

You have to realize that this is an editor's text and the spelling and
letterforms have been normalized. In Old Saxon, "uu" and "Uu" are conventional.
Me, I would have preferred a convention of "w" and "W", since the sound [w]
is indeed intended, but that would probably have been too hard on the
modern Germans who worked out the normalized orthography.

> Universal? I don't know any other language apart English that calls that
> letter "double U". In Italian and French, it is called "double V",

A detail, a detail! :-)

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