As I’ve said before, I find foreign language a fascinating topic. And I read about it every chance I get. But there’s one thing that is still unclear to me.
Did the ancient Romans have our vee (V) sound?
I know our vee would be pronounced like our W to them. And in modern Latin it is pronounced like our vee, just like in most languages today anyways (including Italian).
Part of the reason why I am confused, is because I know they had the F sound. And F is just an unvoiced vee, basically.
All I know for sure is that Hebrew has a similar situation. Hebrew has a letter which is sometimes a vowel and sometimes a consonant. As a vowel, it can be pronounced either like “o” or like “oo” depending on the word. As a consonant, it pronounced “w” in some dialects, and the letter’s name is “waw” in those dialects. In other dialects, it is called “vav”, and has a “v” sound, but sometimes they double it to signify a “w” sound.
There are so many similarities to “u”, “v”, and “double-u”, that I suspect that there is a common thread to them all. But here’s the monkey wrench: This Hebrew letter’s position in the alphabet is not near the end, but close to the beginning, corresponding to F’s place in English!
And the “zh” sound is just a voiced “sh”, and yet it’s basically absent from English, even though “sh” is common. Except in the combination “dzh”, which we represent with the letter “j”. Which, in Latin, made almost the sound, or rather, set of sounds, that we represent in English with “y”.
Languages don’t need to make sense.
The ancient Romans did not, in fact, have the phoneme /v/ in native Latin vocabulary. There were no voiced fricatives at all in native vocabulary – /z/ was a relatively rare sound chiefly incorporated through Greek loan words.
It’s not unusual for a language to have different ways of parsing out voiced vs unvoiced sounds. The neighboring Etruscan language is thought to have been even poorer in voiced consonants than Latin – no analog for English /b/, /d/, /g/, /v/, or /z/. In practice, though, this commonly ends up meaning that (say) Etruscan speakers likely did utter /d/s and /v/s in their conversational speech – just that they didn’t make a mental distinction between these and the default unvoiced sounds. To them, a /t/ was a /d/ was a /t/ … slight permutations on the same sound.
EDIT: I see what you mean now. Never mind .
Huh, English does so have words with the zh sound. Examples: measure and leisure. We just don’t spell the sound with zh except in Russian names.
Hebrew does in fact have a letter that, at least in Modern Hebrew, is pronounced /v/ : an “aspirated” ב, as opposed to בּ which is pronounced /b/.
A consonantal ו is pronounced /w/ (without having to be geminated or doubled), but in many modern Hebrew dialects can indeed become /v/.
@dtilque That was actually what I originally said. That sound is represented in dictionaries as zh, and in Russian names too (which of course uses a different alphabet). But interestingly, in Esperanto it is represented by jh.
Also interesting, I was doing my best to decipher the French section of my French-English dictionary. And ‘zh’ represented our hard th sound. Also interesting, they described our th sounds as a ‘lispy s/z’. Is it?
Our English ‘th’ sounds aren’t far from the French ‘s’ and ‘z’ sounds, so it’s not a bad description, although I don’t think lispy is a technical linguistic term. And French speakers do tend to substitute ‘s’ and ‘z’ for our ‘th’ sounds when speaking English - “this thing” becomes “sees zing”.
Speakers of other languages tend to to use ‘t’ and ‘d’ instead, so in Africa “this thing” becomes “dis ting”.
These sounds are very hard for non native speakers to master.
Back to the original question, the /v/ sound in most modern Romance languages developed from the /w/ sound in older versions of Latin.
“th” is just pretty rare in general, hence unfamiliar. You would probably have to describe it to someone as a “voiceless dental fricative” and/or play them a tape.
“ll” as in Welsh is a bit different, don’t know if more common, sound, maybe that is the “lispy” one
and that sound was spelled uu, withthe letter “u” drawn with a pointy bottom instead of a round bottom. Am I correct?
I just thought it was because pointy bottoms are easier to carve than rounded bottoms.
u = v in Latin and represents /u/ as well as /w/; uu occurs in words like uacuus. Wikipedia says it began to develop into a fricative around the first century AD.
One thing that is unclear to me is whether the /v/ that developed from /w/ is bilabial (as /w/ is) or dento-labial as is the English and French /v/.
My Japanese friend told that the /f/ (as in Fuji) is bilabial in Japanese and that is the way he would say when speaking Japanese, but when he was speaking English, like to me, he would use the dento-labial sound. He was linguistically gifted, speaking French and German in addition to excellent English.
Aah, yes, that well-known language, ‘African’ 