# How did Julius Caesar pronounce the letter "V"?



## rambler

When I studied latin in school (decades ago), the teacher said that the ancient Romans pronounced the letter "V" like the modern English "W". As an example, "Veni, vidi, vici" (I came, I saw, I conquered) was pronounced "Waynee, weedee, weekee".

If this is true, then how and when did the pronunciation change (in Italian, French, and Spanish) to become like the modern "V"?


----------



## diegodbs

This is what the RAE (Real Academia de la Lengua) says about "v":



> La pronunciación de la _v_ como labiodental no ha existido nunca en español,


 
"V as a labiodental sound has never been used in Spanish"

The transcription of ancient Iberian alphabets have never shown a distinction between /b/ and /v/. Basque language, the only remaining language of those times has no /v/ sound either. Latin words with that /v/ sound were naturally assimilated and pronounced as /b/.

Some areas in America can show a distinction between /v/ and /b/ due to the influence of the languages spoken there before the Spaniards' arrival.

Latin "venire" ---> Spanish "venir"----> pronunciation /benír/
Latin "videre"----> Spanish "ver"-----> pronunciatioin /ber/
Latin "vinum"----> Spanish "vino"----> pronunciation /bíno/


----------



## mansio

The V in Latin is what is called a semi-consonant. Pronounced as the vowel "oo" after a consonant and as English "w" at the beginning of a syllable. 
The script was modified by a French scholar in the 16th century: the V with "oo" sound was changed into a U. I don't know if at that time it was already pronounced as modern "v".

A similar change in script happened at the same time to the I, also a semi-consonant. To distinguish between the initial consonant and the vowel  the French scholar  changed the consonant I into a J. That J was pronounced as English "y". It changed into an English "j" or a French "j" at a date I don't know either.


----------



## ALOV

When I studied Latin (also 1 decade ago) my prof told me there was a difference between:
- 'popular' Latin spoken by the majority of the people in the street and in family context 
/v/ 
- a more 'cultural' version of Latin, as Cicero used in his speeches for instance.
Besides vocabulary and syntaxic differences, they was also a different pronounciation: In popular Latin v was pronounced as v; c as tsj ; ae as (english) a etc. whereas 'written' or 'cultural' Latin it was v, k and (english) i.
Most of Roman languages are derived from the popular version, with influences of the languages spoken in that region before the Roman invasion.
I think Caesar adapted his pronounciation depending on the context: 'popular' Latin while speaking to his soldiers and more 'official' Latin when he was in the Senate.


----------



## Cnaeius

> La pronunciación de la _v_ como labiodental no ha existido nunca en español,


 
I’m not an expert and I’m not Spanish, but are you sure? The link below says that the is no general agreement 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_labiodental_fricative


In Italian v was _graphically_ distinguished from u  by Giorgio Trissino in XVI century, but _phonetically_ I do not know. Perhaps more or less it has always existed in the substratum conveyed by the Latin of common people (vulgar latin), but actually I do not know.
Ciao


----------



## diegodbs

Cnaeius said:
			
		

> I’m not an expert and I’m not Spanish, but are you sure? The link below says that the is no general agreement
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_labiodental_fricative
> 
> 
> In Italian v was _graphically_ distinguished from u by Giorgio Trissino in XVI century, but _phonetically_ I do not know. Perhaps more or less it has always existed in the substratum conveyed by the Latin of common people (vulgar latin), but actually I do not know.
> Ciao


 
I am no expert either, but I think that a quotation from the RAE is more reliable (for me) than Wikipedia. 

.





> La pronunciación de la _v_ como labiodental no ha existido nunca en español, y solo se da de forma espontánea en hablantes valencianos o mallorquines y en los de algunas zonas del sur de Cataluña, cuando hablan castellano, por influencia de su lengua regional. También se da espontáneamente en algunos puntos de América por influjo de las lenguas amerindias




_Diccionario panhispánico de dudas ©2005
Real Academia Española © Todos los derechos reservados_


----------



## Cnaeius

diegodbs said:
			
		

> I am no expert either, but I think that a quotation from the RAE is more reliable (for me) than Wikipedia.


 

Yes of course, but I posted it because two theories are mentioned, rather than a specific answer.
I forgot to tell that in modern Italian v is pronounced v and not u, so (more or less):

C. Latin "Veni Vidi Vici" ---> Ueni Uidi Uiki
Italian "Venni Vidi Vinsi"---> Venni Vidi Vinsi

Ciao


----------



## Outsider

rambler said:
			
		

> When I studied latin in school (decades ago), the teacher said that the ancient Romans pronounced the letter "V" like the modern English "W". As an example, "Veni, vidi, vici" (I came, I saw, I conquered) was pronounced "Waynee, weedee, weekee".
> 
> If this is true, then how and when did the pronunciation change (in Italian, French, and Spanish) to become like the modern "V"?


The answer to your question is more convoluted than you're probably expecting.

1. The "v" did not become like the English "v" in all Romance languages. In Spanish and other Iberian languages (and possibly in other Romance languages), it first  became a B-like sound which I believe was the bilabial fricative, a sound which does not exist in English. Old Spanish had both this sound (written v/u) and the regular "b" (bilabial plosive). In Spanish, these two sounds eventually merged (became indistinguishable). But in other Romance languages "v" did eventually come to be pronounced as the "v" of modern English.

2. So when did "v" start denoting a different sound from [w]? Probably in the early Middle Ages, as the Romance languages were being born, or perhaps even sooner than that.

3. And when did it come to be pronounced as the English "v", in the languages that kept the distinction between "b" and "v"? I don't know exactly when, and it may have been at different dates for different languages.


----------



## Broca's Area

In Classical Latin the letter V represented the vowel  as a syllable nucleus (e.g. VNVS ['unus]"one") and the velar glide [w] as an onset or as a coda (e.g. VENI ['we:ni] "I Came" and AVDEO ['awdeo] "I dare"). During the Imperial Age (31 BC - 476 AD) the velar glide started to evolve into a voiced bilabial fricative /β/ (in some inscriptions B is written instead of V). In Spanish eventually this phoneme became /b/, merging with the reflexes of original Latin B /b/: BIBERE ['bibere] > _beber_ [be'βer]  VIVERE ['wiwere] > _vivir_ [bi'βir]. This phoneme /b/ between two vowels has a fricative allophone [β]. In many other Romance languages (such as Italian and French) /β/ became eventually a voiced labiodental frivative /v/:VIVERE ['wiwere] > it. _vivere _['vivere].
 
In English the words _wine_ and _vine_ are both borrowings from Latin VINVM. _Wine_ retains the pronounciation of Classical Latin with the glide, while _vine_ was borrowed later and has a fricative.


----------



## Jhorer Brishti

Since no one has answered your query in regards to 'how' it changed, there's not a great difference between the pronunciation of a V or W. I am sadly ignorant of all the technical linguistic terms but you can see that a V is pronounced much like a W except that the lower lip touches the upper teeth. Many foreigners(Germans are the often stereotyped for exhibiting this in America) do not distinguish between Ws or Vs in popular culture.


----------



## mansio

That comes from the fact that W in German is the English V. To make it more complicated their V is pronounced as a F.


----------



## ALOV

Jhorer Brishti said:
			
		

> Since no one has answered your query in regards to 'how' it changed, there's not a great difference between the pronunciation of a V or W. I am sadly ignorant of all the technical linguistic terms but you can see that a V is pronounced much like a W except that the lower lip touches the upper teeth. Many foreigners(Germans are the often stereotyped for exhibiting this in America) do not distinguish between Ws or Vs in popular culture.


 
It's not just a question of lips, there's also a difference of using the vocal chords when pronouncing v which is not the case for w.
And it's not because we don't find an explanation on how it changed, that there is no great difference...
In a lot of language it's fundamental to distinguish these two letters!
p.ex. Dutch: 
worm (wurm) - vorm (shape) 
waar (where) - vaar (sail)
wal (sort of wall) - val (fall)
wat (what) - vat (burrel)
win (win) - vin (part of fish)
etc.etc.


----------



## TimeHP

Link:
http://community.middlebury.edu/~harris/LatinBackground/Pronunciation.html

Ciao


----------



## wtrmute

I read on a linguistics book that, prior to the 3rd Century, the _nomen_ VALERIVS was rendered in Greek sources as ΟΥΑΛΕΡΙΟΣ.  After that, the form changed to ΒΑΛΕΡΙΟΣ.

This is a sign that the pronunciation of Latin consonantal V changed in pronunciation from /w/ to /v/ or /β/.  This is after Caesar, but before Jerome.


----------



## Kevin Beach

Is the v/w juxtaposition entirely a Latin/Romance issue? They are often interchangeable in Sanskrit-related languages too, e.g. Diwali/Divali, Dewesar/Devesar. Is there an IE background to the penomenon?


----------



## Sobakus

Kevin Beach said:


> Is the v/w juxtaposition entirely a Latin/Romance issue? They are often interchangeable in Sanskrit-related languages too, e.g. Diwali/Divali, Dewesar/Devesar. Is there an IE background to the penomenon?



PIE only had the [w] phoneme, which either turned into [v] or disappeared in the majority of the descendant languages. In fact, I can't think of any language other than English (and Scots) that retained it to this day from the top of my head.


----------



## fdb

Sobakus said:


> PIE only had the [w] phoneme, which either turned into [v] or disappeared in the majority of the descendant languages. In fact, I can't think of any language other than English (and Scots) that retained it to this day from the top of my head.



Actually, no one knows how PIE "phonemes" were "pronounced". As for [w] in modern IE languages, of the top of MY head I can think of lots that have [w], starting with French (e.g. in oui), Italian (uovo), Spanish etc. etc., Afghan Persian, Pashto, Ossetic etc. etc. But not Russian.


----------



## wtrmute

fdb said:


> Actually, no one knows how PIE "phonemes" were "pronounced". As for [w] in modern IE languages, of the top of MY head I can think of lots that have [w], starting with French (e.g. in oui), Italian (uovo), Spanish etc. etc., Afghan Persian, Pashto, Ossetic etc. etc. But not Russian.



But of those two examples you gave, neither remount to PIE /w/ — the first derives from the expression _hoc ille_ > _oïl_ > _oui_, and the second is a diphtongization of a long /o/ in Vulgar language.  What he meant was that the phoneme of PIE to which we assign the value /w/ has, in modern languages, either disappeared completely or reflected as a /v/ or some other sound which evolved from a /v/.  The exceptions are English and Scots, apparently, where words with modern /w/ can be traced to a PIE /w/ phoneme (whatever it may have sounded then).

I don't know whether Sobakus is right in this, since I know little about comparative phonology, but it's the hypothesis he's presenting.


----------



## fdb

I see what you are saying. Here is a better example from Iranian:  Ossetic  уад  /wad/ “wind” continuing  Indo-Iranian *wāt-V- , IE *h₂weh₁-.


----------



## Kevin Beach

fdb said:


> Actually, no one knows how PIE "phonemes" were "pronounced". As for [w] in modern IE languages, of the top of MY head I can think of lots that have [w], starting with French (e.g. in oui), Italian (uovo), Spanish etc. etc., Afghan Persian, Pashto, Ossetic etc. etc. But not Russian.



And Polish*       Ł (ł)      *   I believe.


----------



## fdb

Kevin Beach said:


> And Polish*       Ł (ł)      *   I believe.



Indeed, but wtrmute has explained that he/she is only interested in examples where IE *w is continued by /w/ in a daughter language. This is not the case in Polish.


----------



## wandle

wtrmute said:


> The exceptions are English and Scots, apparently, where words with modern /w/ can be traced to a PIE /w/ phoneme (whatever it may have sounded then).


Is this certain? If it refers to words like 'wind', 'water', 'wagon', 'wight' etc., may it not be that the modern pronunciation developed in succession to the German pronunciation, and that that has remained unchanged since the split?


----------



## fdb

In that case you would need to explain why /v/ became /w/ in Germanic words, but not in Latin/Romance words.


----------



## wandle

Why? If the English pronunciation diverged from the German only after English became separate from the Germanic stem, then the divergence is necessarily independent of any changes that preceded the split.


----------



## sumelic

It's certainly possible in theory for the sound change [v] --> [w] to occur. But there are signs that the sound was [w] instead of [v] in PIE: the sound alternates with a vowel *u, which is more likely behavior for a semivowel than for a fricative. And if we're starting off with a [w] and have to explain descendants with [v] and [w], it seems more parsimonious to posit a single change of [w] > [v], [w] rather than a change [w] > [v] > [v], [w]. Also, my impression is that in word-inital position, fortition of [w] to [v] is more common than the reverse  process; the only instance of possible [v] > [w] I can think of right now is in Danish, where orthographic "v" at the end of a syllable corresponds to a [w]-like offglide in diphthongs. But in the syllable onset, Danish has [ʋ]. There is probably more evidence that I can't remember right now.


----------



## berndf

wandle said:


> Why? If the English pronunciation diverged from the German only after English became separate from the Germanic stem, then the divergence is necessarily independent of any changes that preceded the split.


- The German shift [w]>[v] is even today not yet complete. There are dialects (I am thinking of Bavarian dialects here) that pronounce leans like _Vase _or _Veronika _markedly different from native words like _was_. In these dialects, _Vase _or _Veronika_ are de-voiced_._ My wife, a native speaker of a Bavarian dialect, told my that had to train the sound [v] in English and French class at school because the sound does not occur in her dialect.
- Dutch realizes /w/ the same way as the dialects mentioned above. Dutch has maintained phonemic difference between /w/ and /v/. In some dialects /v/ and /f/ are merged but not in all.
- Older Latin loans produce German words (and also English ones) spelled with <w> later ones spelled with <v> and pronounced [v] in both languages.
- In German, v and f were used interchangeable in Old and Middle High German. If is pretty clear that [v] existed in old Germanic languages but not as a realization of /w/ but as an allophone of /f/. Trances of this are pairs like _wol*f*_ and _wol*v*es_. There are German dialects (northern) where the allophonic distribution of [f] and [v] is to some degree still alive._ Ho*f*mann_ and _fün*f*_ are pronounced with [f] but _Richtho*f*en_ and _fün*f*e_ with [v].
- The spelling (_w_ is a later graphical variant of _uu/vv_, hence the English name "double u") suggest a semi-vowel.

All of this is only circumstantial evidence but seen together it forms a very solid picture.


----------



## fdb

berndf said:


> - In these dialects, _Vase _or _Veronika_ are de-voiced_._



Is this dialect, or merely spelling pronunciation of borrowed words/names?


----------



## berndf

fdb said:


> Is this dialect, or merely spelling pronunciation of borrowed words/names?


My modification probably crossed with your question. I added this:


berndf said:


> My wife, a native speaker of a Bavarian dialect,  told my that had to train the sound [v] in English and French class at  school because the sound does not occur in her dialect.


Does that implicitly answer your question? (The native sound closest to [v] is still [f], as it obviously was the case in OHG and MHG, and not the sound that realizes <w> in her dialect).


----------



## wandle

Interesting. Is this really a case then where English has preserved from earlier Indo-European a continuity which German has broken?
We (or at least I) suppose that German is almost always closer to the common origin and that English generally represents a shift further away from the stem.


----------



## berndf

Yes, there are two sounds English has preserved which most other Germanic languages list: w and th.


----------



## sumelic

German is not really more conservative than English overall in the sounds it uses; where it might be considered more conservative is the general distribution of these sounds, its grammatical structures, and especially its lexicon. With regards to the sounds it uses, the vowel sounds of German are generally less changed than those of English, but the consonants have shifted as much as or more than the ones in English.


----------



## Cenzontle

> La pronunciación de la _v_ como labiodental no ha existido nunca en español,
> 
> 
> 
> I’m not an expert and I’m not Spanish, but are you sure? The link below says that the is no general agreement
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_labiodental_fricative
Click to expand...

All I see about Spanish in the Wiki article is


> Allophone of /f/ before voiced consonants. SeeSpanish phonology


I challenge you to give an example of Spanish /f/ before a voiced consonant aside from "afgano" and "Afganistán".


----------



## jmx

A pronunciation of "v" in Spanish that was different from that of "b" did certainly exist. In medieval texts, the letter "u/v" is systematically used for certain words instead of "b", in a way that is consistent with the proposed sound changes from latin. Furthermore, several Amerindian languages have loanwords from Spanish that are also consistent in pronouncing in a different way words that were written differently back in the 16th century. By the way, in modern Spanish the spelling contrast between "b/v" is compleletly *in*consistent with the original difference in pronunciation.

Now, I don't think there is an agreement about what exactly the sound written "u/v" in medieval Spanish was like. The theory I know is that it was a bilabial (not labiodental) fricative. However, the two closest languages (Portuguese and Catalan) both have a /v/ labiodental phoneme in their southern peninsular dialects.


----------



## berndf

Could someone explain to me what this is important for the question of the thread? I understand why the question is important if other IE languages contemporary to Latin had a /v/ or a /w/ phoneme. But I can't see the relevance of the internal development in Spanish for the question of the thread.


----------



## yezik

_ I am sure someone Ceasar had no tape-recorder. More over, nobody's seen his birth certificate..._
As far as I know all words in English starting by W are in common with Balto-Slavic, and words starting by V - from Latin.  More over, ukrainiens do not make the difference between V and U up to now. Probably the same was in England:  WALL - VVAL - УВАЛ (russ.)  DVA (rus) - D*u*o(Lat) -T*w*o (Eng.)..
On maps of 15-16 centuries we can see scriptos like POLVS or RVSSIA. It means there was no defference between V  and U (Leter U was absent at this time?!).
The W in France - double V, in England - double U. More over:  Vous (fr) = You (eng), Vestrum (lat)= Yester(day) ... ?  V=Y ?


----------



## Delvo

Kevin Beach said:


> Is the v/w juxtaposition entirely a Latin/Romance issue? They are often interchangeable in Sanskrit-related languages too, e.g. Diwali/Divali, Dewesar/Devesar. Is there an IE background to the penomenon?


Changes between the two have also happened in Germanic languages and Hebrew. Hebrew is an interesting case because it still uses an alphabet with no dedicated vowels, just some letters that double as consonants and vowels like our [y] does. In related alphabets, the letter for /w/ can be used sometimes for /u/ or /o/, but in Hebrew, that letter's use as a consonant has become /v/, while its use as a vowel has remained the same, yielding the strange combination of /v/ and /u,o/ as roles for the same letter. Its name has also changed from "waw" to "vav". In Europe, when a letter's roles diverged too much, they'd split it into two separate letters, one for the old role and one for the new one.

The relationship between /b/ and /v/ (and the one between /p/ and /f/), also, is reflected in multiple ways in unrelated languages. It looks like the intermediate states, in which the lips come very close but don't quite touch or might only very lightly partially touch & vibrate against each other (represented in IPA by "β" and "φ"), must be very unstable, because languages don't tend to keep them that way for long before they evolve into something else again. Shifts from /p/ or aspirated /p/ to /f/ without preservation of or lingering in the intermediate state happened in at least Proto-Germanic, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac, and similar shifts between /b/ and /v/ have happened in Greek, Latin or its descendants, Hebrew, and Syriac. Slavic languages inherited the letter "beta" from the Greeks with dual roles during the transition and ended up splitting it into the Cyrillic letters "be" and "ve" but no third letter for the intermediate sound.



wandle said:


> Interesting. Is this really a case then where English has preserved from earlier Indo-European a continuity which German has broken?
> We (or at least I) suppose that German is almost always closer to the common origin and that English generally represents a shift further away from the stem.





sumelic said:


> German is not really more conservative than English overall in the sounds it uses; where it might be considered more conservative is the general distribution of these sounds, its grammatical structures, and especially its lexicon. With regards to the sounds it uses, the vowel sounds of German are generally less changed than those of English, but the consonants have shifted as much as or more than the ones in English.


English has changed a lot in the last several centuries, but could have had a much slower rate of change before that.



yezik said:


> On maps of 15-16 centuries we can see scriptos like POLVS or RVSSIA. It means there was no defference between V  and U (Leter U was absent at this time?!).


There was only one letter, and it looked like our [v], but it's better to think of it as a different-looking version of , not really like our [v]. That way, when it's put in situations where the /w/ sound is called for, it's easy to see how it's automatic and not even really a separate sound at all. For example, read the quote about Julius Caesar in Gaul as "Ueni, uidi, uici".

Funny thing about when a letter gets split into two to account for sound shifts: it seems that every time they do that, the newer, more different-looking symbol gets the old original sound, and the one more like the old original symbol gets the new derived sound. (Latin [c] & [g], Latin  & [v], Arabic sin & shin, six different Hebrew plosives that can now be fricatives when unmarked and need dots to specify the plosive pronunciation, Cyrillic tse & che, Cyrillic be & ve)


----------



## hadronic

But not with i vs j


----------



## merquiades

berndf said:


> - The German shift [w]>[v] is even today not yet complete. There are dialects (I am thinking of Bavarian dialects here) that pronounce leans like _Vase _or _Veronika _markedly different from native words like _was_. In these dialects, _Vase _or _Veronika_ are de-voiced_._ My wife, a native speaker of a Bavarian dialect, told my that had to train the sound [v] in English and French class at school because the sound does not occur in her dialect.
> - Dutch realizes /w/ the same way as the dialects mentioned above. Dutch has maintained phonemic difference between /w/ and /v/. In some dialects /v/ and /f/ are merged but not in all.
> - Older Latin loans produce German words (and also English ones) spelled with <w> later ones spelled with <v> and pronounced [v] in both languages.
> - In German, v and f were used interchangeable in Old and Middle High German. If is pretty clear that [v] existed in old Germanic languages but not as a realization of /w/ but as an allophone of /f/. Trances of this are pairs like _wol*f*_ and _wol*v*es_. There are German dialects (northern) where the allophonic distribution of [f] and [v] is to some degree still alive._ Ho*f*mann_ and _fün*f*_ are pronounced with [f] but _Richtho*f*en_ and _fün*f*e_ with [v].
> - The spelling (_w_ is a later graphical variant of _uu/vv_, hence the English name "double u") suggest a semi-vowel.
> 
> All of this is only circumstantial evidence but seen together it forms a very solid picture.



Very interesting information, Berndf.  I have always wondered why quite a few German-Americans cannot pronounce /v/ and consistently say things like "wery", "wictory".  Bizarre since I know there is indeed a /v/ very prevalent in German, but no /w/.  I guess these people have high German/ Bavarian origins.  That actually is consistent with their traditions and faith.


----------



## berndf

The effect is strongest with speakers from this regions but not restricted to them. Other German don't have problems producing both [v] and [w] but it is still difficult for them to keep the two sounds apart. For those speakers what you describe is a classical hypercorrection.


----------

