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Originally Posted by DaleDe
Ah, well handwriting caused this particular problem. Originally the glyphs for U and V were reversed from what they are now. They got switched after the W was added to the alphabet which is why it is still called double u.
When handwriting became more popular it was deemed that the u was written much more often than the v, after all it was a vowel. The flowing of handwriting as apposed to printing was much easier to make a flowing u in a word than a v so the powers that be switched the glyphs for the two letters. This happened in the late 17th or more likely the early 18th century. (I am sure it took a while to switch.) Existing printing including the KJV bible had to be reprinted to conform to the new convention. This is all part of the transition from middle English to modern English. You can still find early works where the letter glyphs are reversed. I usually reverse them to modern usage when making an eBook from these early sources as well as fixing the long flowing S that looks like a f from the same time period.
Dale
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During the Late Middle Ages, two forms of 'v' developed, which were both used for its ancestor /u/ and modern /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 'valour' and 'excuse' appeared as in modern printing, 'have' and 'upon' were printed as 'haue' and 'vpon'. The first distinction between the letters 'u' and 'v' is recorded in a Gothic script from 1386, where 'v' preceded 'u'. By the mid-16th century, the 'v' form was used to represent the consonant and 'u' the vowel sound, giving us the modern letter 'u'. Capital 'U' was not accepted as a distinct letter until many years later.
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And that's enough OT in this post!