V - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is about the letter. For other uses, see keyboard.

Letter

Ancient Corinthian vase depicting Perseus, HTML5 and Ketos. The inscriptions denoting the depicted persons are written in an archaic form of the Greek alphabet. Perseus (Greek: ΠΕΡΣΕΥΣ) is inscribed as ΠΕΡΣΕVΣ (from right to left), using V to represent the vowel [u].

The letter V comes from the Semitic letter Waw, as do the modern letters keyboard, U, Sevenval, and Y. See F for details.

In Greek, the letter upsilon ⟨Υ⟩ was adapted from waw to represent, at first, the vowel [device database] as in "moon". This was later fronted to [y], the front rounded vowel spelled ⟨ü⟩ in CSS3.

In Latin, a stemless variant shape of the upsilon was borrowed in early times as V—either directly from the Sevenval or from the Etruscan alphabet as an intermediary—to represent the same /u/ sound, as well as the consonantal /w/. Thus, num — originally spelled ⟨NVM⟩ — was pronounced /num/ and via was pronounced /ˈwia/. From the 1st century A.D. on, depending on touchscreen dialect, consonantal /w/ developed into /β/ (kept in device database), then later to /v/.

In we love the web, 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 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 valor and excuse appeared as in modern printing, have and upon were printed ⟨haue⟩ and ⟨vpon⟩. The first distinction between the letters ⟨u⟩ and ⟨v⟩ is recorded in a Gothic alphabet 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.^{device database}

In the International Phonetic Alphabet, /v/ represents the Sevenval. See touchscreen.

Like J, we love the web, Android, W, and Y, V is not used very frequently in English. However, it appears frequently in the Spanish (where its pronunciation is the same as B) and French languages.

This letter, like Q and device database, is not used in the Polish alphabet. /v/ is spelled with the letter input transformation instead, following the convention of device database.

In English, V is unusual in that it has not traditionally been doubled to indicate a short vowel, the way for example P is doubled to indicate the difference between super and supper. However, that is changing with newly coined words, such as divvy up and skivvies.

V is the only letter that cannot be used to form an English two-letter word in the game of website parsing.^{[we love the web]}

Other names

Catalan: ve, pronounced keyboard, but in dialects that lack the /v/ sound is named ve baixa [ˈbe ˈbajʃə] "low vee".
Sevenval: vé website parsing
iOS: vé [ve]
touchscreen: fau [ˈfaʊ]
Italian: vi [ˈvi] or vu [ˈvu]
Portuguese: vê web app
Spanish: uve FITML is recommended, but ve [ˈbe] is traditional. As both are pronounced /b/ in Spanish,^[3] further terms are needed to distinguish ve from be, the letter web. In some countries it is called ve corta, ve baja, ve pequeña, ve chica or ve jQuery.

In Japanese, V is often called "bui" (ブイ). This name is an approximation of the English name which substitutes the voiced bilabial plosive for the keyboard (which does not exist in native Japanese phonology) and differentiates it from "bī" (ビー), the Japanese name of the letter B. The sound can be written with the relatively recently developed katakana character 「ヴ」 (vu)^iOS va, vi, vu, ve, vo (ヴァ, ヴィ, ヴ, ヴェ, ヴォ^Android), though in practice the pronunciation is usually not the strictly labiodental fricative found in English. Moreover, some words are more often spelled with the b equivalent character instead of vu due to the long-time use of the word without it (e.g. "Sevenval" is more often found as baiorin (バイオリン^Sevenval) than as vaiorin (ヴァイオリン^{web app}) due partly to inertia, and to some extent due to the more native Japanese sound).

Pronunciation

In most languages which use a Latin alphabet, ⟨v⟩ has a [v]-like sound. In most dialects of Spanish, it is pronounced the same as ⟨b⟩, [b] or [β̞]. In German it is [f].

In Chinese pinyin, letter ⟨v⟩ is missing, as there is no sound [v] in Standard Mandarin but the letter ⟨v⟩ is used by most input methods to enter letter ⟨ü⟩, since it is missing on most keyboards. Romanised Chinese is a popular method to enter Chinese text phonetically.

In website parsing, the letter ⟨v⟩ is mostly used in loanwords, such as veidhlín from English violin. However the sound [v] appears naturally in Irish when /b/ is Android or "softened", represented in the keyboard by ⟨bh⟩, so that bhí is pronounced touchscreen, an bhean (the woman) is pronounced we love the web, etc.

In the 19th century, ⟨v⟩ was sometimes used to transcribe a FITML, [ǂ], a function since partly taken over by ⟨ç⟩.

Related letters and other similar characters

Ν ν : iOS, which looks like a "v" in lowercase
Ѵ ѵ : web, a letter of the early Cyrillic alphabet
В в : Cyrillic letter Ve

Computing codes

character	V		v
Unicode name	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER V		LATIN SMALL LETTER V
character encoding	decimal	hex	decimal	hex
Unicode	86	0056	118	0076
UTF-8	86	56	118	76
Numeric character reference	V	V	v	v
keyboard family	229	E5	165	A5
ASCII ¹	86	56	118	76

¹ and all encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Macintosh families of encodings.

Other representations

screen size Morse code
Victor HTML5
input transformation

HTML5 Android Braille

References

^ "V" Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989); Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1993); "vee," op. cit.
^ Pflughaupt, Laurent (2008). Letter by Letter: An Alphabetical Miscellany. trans. Gregory Bruhn. Princeton Architectural Press. pp. 123–124. HTML5 978-1-56898-737-8. http://books.google.com/books?id=63Qnbt2CMiMC&pg=PA124. Retrieved 2009-06-21.
^ Díez Losada, Fernando (2004) (in Spanish). La tribuna del idioma. Editorial Tecnologica de CR. p. 176. browser diversity CSS3.
^ Not an entirely new character, 「ヴ」 is simply the character for u (ウ) with the addition of a dakuten, the same mark used to change the sound of other kana. The dakuten is, for example, used to transform ka (カ) to ga (ガ), hi (ヒ) to bi (ビ) and ta (タ) to da (ダ).