V


V, or v, is the twenty-second letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is vee, plural vees.

Name

  • ; in dialects that merge and, the letter is called ve baixa .
  • or vu
  • Japanese: is called a variety of names that approximate its English name, most commonly ブイ or ; still, less nativized variants, violating to an extent Japanese phonotactics, such as ヴィー, ヴイ or, and ヴィ, are also used. The phoneme in Japanese is used properly only in loanwords, where the preference for either or depends on many factors; in general, words that are perceived to be in common use tend toward.
  • ; ⟨v⟩ is not used in native vocabulary, where the /v/ sound is instead represented by ⟨w⟩.
  • is recommended by the Spanish Academy|RAE], but ve is traditional. If is referred to using the latter, it would have the same pronunciation as the letter . Thus, further terms are needed to distinguish ve from be, and to that end, ⟨v⟩ has been called ve corta, ve baja, ve pequeña, ve chica and ve labiodental, among others.

History

The letter ultimately comes from the Phoenician letter waw by way of.
During the Late Middle Ages, two minuscule glyphs of U developed which were both used for sounds including and modern. The pointed form was written at the beginning of a word, while a rounded form was used in the middle or end, regardless of sound. So whereas valour and excuse appeared as in modern printing, have and upon were printed as "haue" and "vpon". The first distinction between the letters and is recorded in a Gothic script from 1386, where preceded. By the mid-16th century, the form was used to represent the consonant and the vowel sound, giving us the modern letter. and were not accepted as distinct letters until many years later. The rounded variant became the modern-day version of, and the letter's former pointed form became.

Use in writing systems

English

In English, represents a voiced labiodental fricative.
Special rules of orthography normally apply to the letter :
  • Traditionally, is not doubled to indicate a short vowel, the way, for example, is doubled to indicate the difference between super and supper. However, that is changing with newly coined words, such as, divvy up and skivvies.
  • A word-final sound is normally spelled -, regardless of the pronunciation of the vowel before it. This rule does not apply to transliterations of Slavic and Hebrew words, such as Kyiv, or to words that started out as abbreviations, such as sov for sovereign.
  • The sound is spelled, not, before the letter. This originated with a mediaeval scribal practice designed to increase legibility by avoiding too many vertical strokes in a row.
Like,,, and, is not used very frequently in English. It is the sixth least frequently used letter in the English language, occurring in roughly 1% of words. is the only letter that cannot be used to form an English two-letter word in the British and Australian versions of the game of Scrabble. It is one of only two letters that cannot be used this way in the American version. is also the only letter in the English language that is never silent.

Romance languages

The letter represents in several Romance languages, but in others it represents the same sound as, i.e., due to a process known as betacism. Betacism occurs in most dialects of Spanish, in some dialects of Catalan and Portuguese, as well as in Aragonese, Asturleonese and Galician.
In Spanish, the phoneme has two main allophones; in most environments, it is pronounced, but after a pause or a nasal it is typically. See Allophones of /b d g/ in Spanish phonology for a more thorough discussion.
In Corsican, represents,, or, depending on the position in the word and the sentence.

Other languages

In most languages that use the Latin alphabet, represents a voiced bilabial or labiodental sound.
In contemporary German, it represents in most loanwords, while in native German words, it always represents.
In standard Dutch, it traditionally represents, but in many regions, it represents in some or all positions.
In the Latinization of the Cherokee syllabary, represents a nasalized schwa,.
In Chinese pinyin, while is not used, the letter is used by most input methods to enter the letter, which most keyboards lack. Informal romanizations of Mandarin Chinese use as a substitute for the close front rounded vowel /y/, properly written in both pinyin and Wade–Giles.

Other systems

In the International Phonetic Alphabet, represents the voiced labiodental fricative.

Other uses

Related characters

Descendants and related letters in the Latin alphabet

Ancestors and siblings in other alphabets

Ligatures and abbreviations

Other representations

Unicode

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