Here the reader may pause: No ancient Roman V? Wasn’t Venus a Roman goddess? Wasn’t there an Italian volcano called Vesuvius, a Roman emperor named Vespasian?
The answer is that the Roman letter in those examples was never V. It was U, only written as V and pronounced as “w.”
To represent their “w” sound, the Romans used the letter U as a consonant. That was U’s second job. Its main job was as a vowel. It was a vowel when placed before a consonant letter or at a word’s end, in Latin words like murus (wall) and manu (by hand). But before a vowel letter, Roman U was recognized as consonant “w.” The word quercus (oak tree), pronounced “kwair-cus,” demonstrates both uses: U first as a consonant, then as a vowel.
·
22 görüntüleme
Yorum yapabilmeniz için giriş yapmanız gerekmektedir.