Morten St George Theory

[-JKP-]

Morten St George:
I've noticed that there was enormous confusion on how to represent the letters "u" and "v", a dilemma which does not seem to have been definitively resolved until sometime between 1623 (First Folio) and 1632 (Second Folio) as now we see that "haue" has become "have".

No confusion.

They were the same. What might SEEM confusing is they had a couple of ways of drawing the shapes but that was completely normal at the time.

For example, at the beginning or middle of a word, they used long-ess. At the end of the word, they used the one that looks like double-ess that is used in German (and eventually became the ß eszett), or the regular ess that we know that was in use in Spain earlier than other countries, or the Greek sigma (σ which was sometimes drawn so it looked a bit like 6).

In other words, it was like Arabic in the sense that there were medial and terminal letters with different shapes but the same meaning.


So, with "u" and "v" there was no confusion as far as scribes were concerned—they read them as the same thing in Latin. There was simply a choice as to how to draw them. Some scribes used the "v" shape as initial "v" and the "u" shape as medial "v", some wrote them all like "v" and some wrote them all like "u". In their heads, they interpreted them the same way—it didn't matter. Read enough manuscripts and you don't even notice any more. Eventually, as the vernacular languages became dominant over Latin, they began to distinguish the different shapes as letters and attach them to different sounds, just as they did with "i" and embellished "i" (which eventually became a "j").