Comment on Vesuvius
Paraneoptera@sopuli.xyz 3 months ago“Anglicized” is probably not the best way to think about it. The Latin letter “v” was pronounced “w” through the classical period, but had shifted to β or v (fricative) by the third century, long before English existed. V was pronounced v (voiced labiodental fricative) for many centuries. And though we do tend to give the classical period a lot of prestige, it was just one phase for Latin.
rockerface@lemm.ee 3 months ago
Funny part is, the same shift happened in a lot of languages. I think some more obvious examples are modern German and Polish, where letter W corresponds to the V sound. Although I believe that the shift happened in German and then Polish borrowed the letter with the new pronunciation.
flughoernchen@feddit.org 3 months ago
Thanks so much for pointing this out. As a native German speaker I still had no idea what’s going on until this comment made me question what a W sounds like in other languages. It’s literally a double-U in English, how come I never stumbled upon that.
Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 3 months ago
in swedish i think we’ve just gone from “fv” to “v”, somehow
very common example since it’s in old surnames: hufvud > huvud