Re: Strangeness of U (was Re: CHAT behove etc (was: Natlag: Middle English impersonal verbs))

On Fri, 10 Mar 2006 18:19:52 -0600, Nik Taylor <yonjuuni@...>
wrote:

>R A Brown wrote:
>> Yes - it simply dates back to the time when U and V were the same
>> letter. If _u_ came before a vowel, then it was /v/, but if it came
>> before a consonant then it was a vowel (with one of the possible
>> pronunciations of |u|).
>>
>> When the two letters were differentiated, those final Es could'v been
>> dropped, but most people continued, and still continue, the write them.
>> It is just habit.
>
>A similar phenomenon is the avoidance of initial {u} to represent /w/ in
>Spanish.  For example, _huevo_ not *_uevo_, due to the fact that uevo
>would've been analyzed as /bebo/ (vevo) in the days when the two letters
>were variants, thus, the letter {h} was added.
>
>This kind of oddity seems, to me, to be rather uncommon in conscripts.
>=========================================================================
Good point. I guess it depends on the conhistory; an old conscript should
have things like this, while a newly-devised or reformed one wouldn't.

I still haven't decided how to handle this in Vallese (which is similar to
Spanish and uses a roman orthography) -- use |hu| and later drop the |h|,
keep the |h| or come up with something else, probably not |w|.

Jeff