Return of the minimal pairs (when is a morpheme not a morpheme?)

[Eduard Selleslagh]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Robert Whiting" <whiting at cc.helsinki.fi>
Sent: Tuesday, May 29, 2001 5:15 PM

> Now for the interesting part.  The Latin alphabet did not have a
> sign for the [w] sound (mostly because it disappeared from Greek)
> and used the <u/v> graph instead.

[Ed Selleslagh]
I doubt that: the Romans didn't have the English v-sound, and the letter u
(written as v) was used as a semi-vowel close to w, or as a vowel. So they
didn't need an extra letter to transcribe Greek wau, if they had had to.

They did introduce Greek z and y [ü] in their alphabet, because these sounds
didn't exist in Latin. Other letters were assimilated to existing Latin ones,
like eta > (long) e:, or represented by combinations like ch, th, ph resulting
in approximately the same sound.

BTW, the Greeks had their own problems with transcription of Latin: I think it
was in Delphi (or was it Olympia - now Olimbía - ?) where I saw AKOAI on an
ancient bath house, for Latin AQUAE.

> Much later, the medieval Norman scribes began writing the u/v graph doubled
> (uu/vv) to indicate the English [w] sound because they were unfamiliar with
> the English letter wyn or wen.  This Norman double-u (or to the French,
> double-vay) became the normal sign for the [w] sound and once again, this is
> the only letter whose name reflects its shape rather than its sound.
> Outrageous coincidence that the old <w> and the new <w> are the only letters
> in their alphabets named for their shapes?
> <snip>
> Bob Whiting

[Ed]
For your information: in Dutch, w is called 'we', pr. like Eng. 'way' (some
Dutchmen will say 'vay').

And Double-U (pr. Dub'ya) is still another thing, nothing to do with its shape
either :-)

Ed.