<snip>
Have just consulted White's Latin dictionary, and learn that 'u' and 'v'
were both derived from the Greek letter upsilon
<snip>
I meant to add that they come from upsilon because the closest Classical
Greek had, orthographically, to a v was the letter nu. Interestingly, and
perhaps not _entirely_ irrelevantly, nu (= /n/) plus tau (= /t/) is used in
modern Greek to represent the English voiced labiodental /d/; a delta cannot
be used since that's pronounced 'th'. The voiced English plosive /b/ is
likewise represented by adding mu (= /m/) to pi (= /p/).
<snip>
That derivation/differentiation stage must have been
interesting -- I wonder how it came about, and why.
<snip>
What I'd suggest is that as individual speakers makes choices as to whether
to use two lips or lip and teeth together, whether to make the sound plosive
or fricative and whether or not to voice the sound, so some old phonemes
eventually disappear and some new ones appear within the language as a
whole. Hence the appearance of the 'v'.
CW
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'I might have known you'd choose the easy way'
(Franz Kline's mother)
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