this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2024
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Rough Roman Memes
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Mixing minuscules and majuscule is relatively recent and "vv" for the sound /w/ is a Germanic thing, Romans didn't use "vv" in any context to my knowledge.
That said, I totally like it as a meme! Just wanted to use the opportunity to throw random facts into the internet.
Yes and no, and it depends… the history of Latin is long and varied as it was spoken by many people in many places over a long time, so I’m going to simplify a lot and hope my memory of long ago lessons is correct.
In this context the “vv” combination was fairly common in Latin and it does have a ‘w’ like sound, which I’m pretty sure is how ‘w’ came to be. In earlier Latin they did not use a ‘vee’ sound. The ‘w’ sounding consonant was represented by a single letter “v”, but the vowel sound now known as ‘u’ was also represented by a single letter “v”. Thus “vv” (‘wu’) had a ‘wuh’-like sound. Vowel “v” also had multiple pronunciations (like tune vs tuck), so when the vowel “v” (or ‘u’ in later Latin) was doubled to “vv”, it would have an ‘oo-uh’ or ‘oo-wuh’ like sound.
So, words like vulgare, vulpes, equus, tuus, manuum, vacuum, and uvula, would all have been spelled vvlgare, vvlpes, eqvvs, tvvs, manvvm, vacvvm, and vvvla, and pronounced with a lot of ‘wuh’s.
From my understanding, old Latin had the sound /w/ and it later shifted to /v/ while keeping the letter, hence early loan words have "w" like "wine" and later ones have "v" like "vernacular".
And you are right that the letter was used for the vowel /u/ too, how did I forget about that. So "vv" would be /vu/ (~voo). But I think Latin never had both /w/ and /v/ sound at the same time.