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

[Robert Whiting]

On Sun, 10 Jun 2001, petegray wrote:

>> Originally Latin had a vocalic [u] and a semi-vowel [w], both written with
>> the <u/v> graph (the two shapes were simply variants of the same
>> grapheme).  ...., they remained more or
>> less interchangeable until the late middle ages.

> The u shape was unknown to the Romans.

This is just not true.  If one considers only inscriptional capitals you
could make a case, but you are ignoring all the handwritten scripts like
Old Roman Cursive (1st-2nd century BC) and New Roman Cursive (4th century
AD) and the various book hands.  Not all Roman writing was engraved in
stone.

> They had only capital V.

In the inscriptional capitals this is true.  In other scripts it is not.
But it is true that individual scripts tended to have either one or the
other of U and V, not both.  Inscriptional capitals and later square
capitals tended to have the pointed shape and cursive hands tended to have
the rounded shape.  But a Roman would have no difficulty in recognizing
inscriptional V and book hand u as the same letter.

> When small letters were developed, about 600 AD or so, the small form
> of V was u, in all contexts.  This is how the Oxford Classical texts
> are still printed:
>    Vbi at the beginning of a sentence, ubi elsewhere.
>    Venit at the beginning of a sentence, uenit elsewhere.

> But this pattern is totally unroman.

You are leaving uncials (popular from the 4th to the 8th century AD,
principally for books) completely out of consideration.  Do you consider
them to be unroman?  The uncial u/v is the origin of the modern lowercase
<u>, but this shape already has its beginnings in the Old Roman Cursive of
the republic.  Most lowercase letters developed out of the uncial and half
uncial hands, but uncials are not lowercase letters but simply more
cursive capitals.  Their forms, however, in many cases led directly to the
modern lowercase forms.

Now I agree that the mixture of u and V in the same script is totally
unroman; roman writing did not mix scripts.  To get V and u in the same
inscription they would have to mix inscriptional capitals or square
capitals with uncials and they just didn't do it.

So the grain of truth in this is that inscriptional capitals had only
V and uncials had only u.  But they were nonetheless variants of the
same letter, even if never used in the same inscription.

Claiming that Latin had only capital V until the 6th century when a
lowercase u sprang out of nowhere is a gross oversimplification of very
complex developments.  Have a look at S. Knight, "The Roman Alphabet" in:
Daniels and Bright, _The World's Writing systems_ (Oxford, 1996), 312-32.

<snip>

Bob Whiting
whiting at cc.helsinki.fi