V is the twenty-second letter in the modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled vee or occasionally ve (pronounced /viː/).[1]
The letter
The letter V ultimately comes from the Semitic letter Waw, as do the modern letters F, U, W, and Y. See F for details. In Greek, the letter "upsilon" (Υ) was adapted from waw to represent, at first, the vowel /u/ as in "moon" and then later /y/, a rounded vowel similar to the German ü). In Latin, it was borrowed in early times as V (without the stem) to represent the same /u/ sound, as well as the consonantal /w/ (historically, Latin /w/ came from Proto-Indo-European /*gʷ/). Thus, num was pronounced "noom" and via was pronounced "wee-a." From the first century A.D. on, depending on Vulgar Latin dialect, consonantal /w/ developed into /b/, then later to /v/. In Roman numerals, the letter V is used to represent the number 5. It was used because it resembled the convention of counting by notches carved in wood, with every fifth notch double-cut to form a "V". During the late Middle Ages, two forms of "v" developed, which were both used for modern u and v. The pointed form "v" was written at the beginning of a word, while a rounded form "u" was used in the middle or end, regardless of sound. So whereas valor and excuse appeared as in modern printing, "have" and "upon" were printed haue and vpon. Eventually, in the 1700s, to differentiate between the consonant and vowel sounds, the "v" form was used to represent the consonant, and "u" the vowel sound, giving us the modern letter "u". Capital "U" appeared at this time; previously, V was used in all cases. Initially, once the letters 'u' and 'v' were established as separate letters, 'v' preceded 'u' in the alphabet; in modern times, this order has been reversed. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, /v/ represents the voiced labiodental fricative. See Help:IPA English pronunciation key. Similarly to J, K, W and Y, V is not used very frequently in the Basic English Language.
Other names
- French: vé
- Italian: vi or vu
- Spanish: uve (recommended) / ve (traditional). In some countries it is called ve corta, ve baja, ve pequeña, or ve chica. These further terms are needed to distinguish ve with be, the letter B, as are both pronounced /be/.
- Portuguese: vê
In Japan, V is often called "bui" (ブイ). This name is an approximation of the English name which substitutes the voiced bilabial plosive for the voiced labiodental fricative (which doesn't exist in native Japanese phonology) and differentiates it from "bī" (ビー), the Japanese name of the letter B. It is now possible to write V in Japanese, thanks to the recent development of new Katakana characters. （ヴァ ヴィ ヴ ヴェ ヴォ）These new characters represent: Va, Vi, Vu, Ve, Vo. Recently, the letter V has been used for the letter W.
Codes for computing
Alternative representations of V
In Unicode the capital V is codepoint U+0056 and the lowercase v is U+0076. The ASCII code for capital V is 86 and for lowercase v is 118; or in binary 01010110 and 01110110, respectively. The EBCDIC code for capital V is 229 and for lowercase v is 165. The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "V" and "v" for upper and lower case respectively.
See also
- Vee
- U
- W
- Nu, Greek letter which looks like a "v" in lowercase
