Man. If I got taken out by some spear chunking furry wearing a fox head spirit hood, I would be SO mad.
Mixing minuscules and majuscule is relatively recent and “vv” for the sound /w/ is a Germanic thing, Romans didn’t use “vv” in any context to my knowledge.
That said, I totally like it as a meme! Just wanted to use the opportunity to throw random facts into the internet.
Yes and no, and it depends… the history of Latin is long and varied as it was spoken by many people in many places over a long time, so I’m going to simplify a lot and hope my memory of long ago lessons is correct.
In this context the “vv” combination was fairly common in Latin and it does have a ‘w’ like sound, which I’m pretty sure is how ‘w’ came to be. In earlier Latin they did not use a ‘vee’ sound. The ‘w’ sounding consonant was represented by a single letter “v”, but the vowel sound now known as ‘u’ was also represented by a single letter “v”. Thus “vv” (‘wu’) had a ‘wuh’-like sound. Vowel “v” also had multiple pronunciations (like tune vs tuck), so when the vowel “v” (or ‘u’ in later Latin) was doubled to “vv”, it would have an ‘oo-uh’ or ‘oo-wuh’ like sound.
So, words like vulgare, vulpes, equus, tuus, manuum, vacuum, and uvula, would all have been spelled vvlgare, vvlpes, eqvvs, tvvs, manvvm, vacvvm, and vvvla, and pronounced with a lot of ‘wuh’s.
From my understanding, old Latin had the sound /w/ and it later shifted to /v/ while keeping the letter, hence early loan words have “w” like “wine” and later ones have “v” like “vernacular”.
And you are right that the letter was used for the vowel /u/ too, how did I forget about that. So “vv” would be /vu/ (~voo). But I think Latin never had both /w/ and /v/ sound at the same time.
Edit - Answered! - This looks funny but I don’t know why. Someone please explain.
‘UwU’ is a common emoji associated with furries.
U and W (‘Double-U’) are both later innovations of the alphabet which did not exist in the period we most associate with Rome. Rome, instead, had only the ‘V’ to represent all three sounds (as well as J and I having the same relationship) - hence why you sometimes see Roman Latin typed out with no U’s, despite the ubiquity of the sound, such as SENATVS for ‘Senatus’ (Senate) or IVPITER for Jupiter.
Here, then, UwU is represented by VvvV
Thank you very much. And yes, that is funny.
The Roman alphabet had neither the letter U nor the letter W. The planet Jupiter for example was spelled IVPITER by the Romans. Both of these letters evolved later from the letter V. U is a basically an oddly shaped V in its origin, and W, despite its English name, is clearly a double V. Hence, Roman UwU is spelled VvvV.
Wasn’t it that V is easier to carve or write than I with the tools at the time?
Thank you.
VvvV
