Re: VW (was: Digest 2 Apr)
From: | Yoon Ha Lee <yl112@...> |
Date: | Wednesday, April 4, 2001, 18:26 |
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
Reply