Quote:
Originally Posted by DanaC
I suspect he may be referring to a convention applied, when u and v looked very similar in print.
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You're close but not quite right. Sorry about that, so I'll clarify this.
The letters u and v were once the same letter, which looked a bit like this: capital letter V, minuscule letter u. Around the time of Shakespeare, the letters began to be differentiated, but the modern usage of vowel=u, consonant=v was not settled until the middle of the 17th century. I posted some First Folio text in this thread. If you read it, you can see that the modern values for the letters was not yet standardized at the time of the publication of the First Folio in 1623.
Sometimes you can see examples of the letter V being used as a vowel even now. The façade of building 10 of the
MASSACHVSETTS INSTIVTE OF TECHNOLOGY is one example. (Photo
here).
Before the letters were differentiated, the way of disambiguating them was: if a consonant followed, it was a vowel; if a vowel followed, it was a consonant. See how it works with the sample MIT text above. Similar rules also existed for the letters I and J, and Classical Latin had these rules too.
The upshot of this is that the spelling of many English words with V in it still have a relic of the pre-split days. Many words with V in them (especially when V would be at the end of the word) are spelt with a silent E after the V. Those rare English words that do end in V are generally recent neologisms or foreign borrowings.
A related curio is that few English words have a double V in it, and those words that do are relatively recent neologisms such as
bovver. In English, we generally double consonants that follow short vowels such as
hammer,
bubble and
running. But we don't do it for V in older words because VV is an old digraph that eventually evolved into W. Early printers didn't always have boxes of W's available (it was a letter unknown in Europe), so they often made do with VV. The doubled V to mark a short vowel simply wasn't available.
If we put these together, it gives reasons behind some of the odder spellings in English when the letters o, u, v and w occur together. For example, we spell "woman" where "wuman" would be expected. Now try spelling it using the older conventions and we get: "uuuman". That's hard to read, so changing the vowel u into o was necessary to aid readability (uuoman), especially in handwritten mauscripts. There are not many words in English with the sequence "wu", but there are plenty of words that are pronounced as if spelt that way. Same goes for "uv"; few are spelt that way but many are pronounced that way.