Re: VW (was: Digest 2 Apr)

On Wed, 4 Apr 2001, Raymond Brown wrote:

> At 4:32 pm -0700 3/4/01, Aidan Grey wrote:
> >> Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
> >> > That reminds me--how/why, insofar as the question
> >> is answerable, did
> >> > Latin v [w] go to v [v] in the Romance languages
> >
> >    /w/ is a bilabial fricative, of sorts, just bring
> >the libs closer and closer together and you'll get a
> >sound more and more /v/-like. Fairly simple, I think.
>
> ...and, of course, this all assumes that Latin v (or more strictly,
> consonantal {u}) was pronounced [w].  Unless one has a time machine, this
> is unprovable.  We can be fairly certain, I think, that it was a labial
> approximant of some sort; but whether it was the bilabial [w] of British &
> American English, or the labio-dental (denoted rather oddly IMO as [P] in
> SAMPA, a stylized lower case upsilon in real IPA) of Indian sub-continental
> English, we simply do not - and cannot - know.
[snip]
Oh dear.  This will teach me not to take Wheelock's pronunciation guide
literally.  <guilty look>

YHL

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