Strangeness of U (was Re: CHAT behove etc (was: Natlag: Middle English imper

>R A Brown wrote:
>>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.
I see. Final vocalic <ue> as in argue, true, blue etc. is presumably a later
innovation?


>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.
As it's been noted, it's probably because they tend to be created freshly
and not 20+ soundchanges before the current state.

The uwjge script does have a few things that show its age, like retaining
the p<>b difference in spelling even tho it's been gone for a while now; the
newly arisen allophone [B] is however always spelt with the "b" glyph, even
when it derives from older */p/.

There's also been random reassignments of glyphs, so what would've been
/zai/ according to the earliest system, now stands for /trO/... but this
doesn't probably count.

John Vertical

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