V-Ness

[Richard Romeo]

Copyright 2000 Southam Inc.
                                The Ottawa Citizen

                            July 2, 2000, Sunday, FINAL

SECTION: The Citizen's Weekly: Books; C14

LENGTH: 602 words

HEADLINE: The Birth of V-ness

SERIES: The History of the Alphabet

BYLINE: David Sacks

BODY:
   This is part of an ongoing series on the history of the alphabet.

Victory at sea. Venus in furs. Virtual reality. Venture capital. Somehow 
letter V adds zest and drama to
the phrases it inhabits; its compelling shape and zippy sound imply purpose, 
immersion, advancement. V
could be a searchlight, a spear point, a drill bit, a praying gesture, a 
ship's cutwater, or geese winging in
a formation millions of years old.

Some of these associations appear in Thomas Pynchon's 1961 novel V., about 
two characters'
time-chase from the 1950s to the 1910s in quest of a mysterious lady known 
as V. Throughout, the
shadowy V. supplies a distant goal-post of enlightenment, until she is 
imperfectly revealed to symbolize
both the 20th (in French, vingtieme) century and human sexuality: V. as the 
goddess Venus or a pair of
legs.

Letter V is one of three latecomers to our Roman alphabet (along with W and 
J), having joined the
order of letters between 1550 and 1700 AD. V and W were born as variants of 
U, while J came from
I. Much earlier, in ancient Roman times, the Roman alphabet had 23 letters 
only. V wasn't one of them.

No ancient Roman V? Wasn't Venus a Roman goddess? Wasn't there a Mount 
Vesuvius? Didn't Julius
Caesar announce, ''Veni, vidi, vici'' (''I came, I saw, I conquered'')?

So how come no Roman V? In all those usages, the Roman letter wasn't V at 
all. It was really U, only
written as ''V'' and pronounced as ''w.''

According to modern scholars, spoken ancient Latin had no sound ''v.'' The 
closest was sound ''f,''
written as F. But Latin did have frequent ''w'' sounds. Caesar's boast would 
have been spoken as
''WAY-nee, WEE-dee, WEE-kee.'' In ancient Italy, a ''new country house'' was 
a villa nova,
pronounced WILL-a NO-wa.

Recently, we traced how ancient Roman U was for centuries written as ''V,'' 
until the ''U'' shape
emerged in ink handwriting of the late Empire. Thereafter, letter U might be 
written either as ''U'' or ''V''
-- with no set distinction between vowel U and consonant U.

But by 1500, consonantal U had strayed so far from its old Roman ''w'' that 
a separate letter was
needed to distinguish the sound -- and printers opted for the underemployed 
shape V.

So finally, V for ''v.'' The new letter's sound supplied its name. Although 
universal in print by 1700, V
wasn't fully official until the mid-1800s, when dictionaries stopped 
treating it as a variant of U. For
example, Samuel Johnson's 1755 English dictionary has no ''V'' heading, 
instead listing all V-words
under ''U.'' Among the first ''U'' entries are ''Vacancy'' and ''Vagrancy,'' 
followed later by ''Ubiquity,''
''Udder,'' ''Veal,'' etc. Johnson even prefaces a note regretting that ''the 
old custom'' prevents him from
treating U and V separately as they deserve.

V's most dramatic role in history has been Winston Churchill's ''V for 
victory'' hand sign, symbol of
British defiance and resolve during the Second World War. Although the 
two-fingered gesture had a
prior, vulgar meaning, Churchill was using it in public appearances by 
summer 1941, just when events
began to suggest that Hitler might not win after all. (Ironically, Hitler 
later launched his own Vs against
England: the V-1 and V-2 flying bombs, named from German Vergeltungswaffe, 
''retaliation weapon.'')

Churchill's V was powerful propaganda -- yet perhaps not so powerful as 
claimed by mystical British
scholar Alfred Kallir, who theorized that the whole Allied war effort was 
being boosted by the letter's
spiritual energy. It was, as Kallir touchingly asserted in a postwar 
booklet, The Victory of V.





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