alifornia
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Ex Libris
C. K. OGDEN
THE
TKANSLITERATION AND PBONUNCIAT10N
OF THE LATIN LETTEE V.
By G. B. GRTJNDY, D.Litt. Oxford.
[Read at the Meeting of the Philological Society on February 1, 1907.]
SUMMARY OF CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I. Transliteration as a basis for inquiry into pronunciation. Inquiry
facilitated by Dr. Eckinger's work on the Inscriptions. Transliterations in
Inscriptions and in received texts compared. Transliteration of Latin v
in Inscriptions and Authors, (pp. 1-11.)
CHAPTER II. Peculiarities of transliteration in Appian, in Dio Cassius, in the
Oxyrhynchus, Fayum, and British Museum Papyri. Effect of convention,
official and otherwise, on transliteration of Latin v. Mode in which its
transliterations vary in accordance with the knowledge of Latin and Greek
possessed by the transliterators. Geographical distribution of the variations.
Special case of Plutarch. Phonetic tendencies observable in the trans-
literations of v . (pp . 1 1 -2 1 . )
CHAPTER III. General attitude of modern authorities towards the pronunciation
of Latin v. The pronunciation of Greek j3. Date at which its pronunciation
began to weaken. and the digamma in late Greek. Pronunciation of the
digamma in certain dialects of later Greek. ft as a transliteration of Latin b.
Evolution of the sounds of ft, Latin b, and Latin v. Various general views
in modern authors on the significance of the ov and ft transliterations of
Latin v . The present writer's conclusions as to the pronunciation of Latin o
in the Augustan age. (pp. 21-34.)
CHAPTER IV. The Latin v in ancient and modern grammarians. Consideration
of the detailed arguments in favour of the w pronunciation of the Latin v.
(pp. 35-41.)
CHAPTER V. The Latin v in Old Celtic, Old High German, Old Low German,
Old Syriac. Latin v in the modern Romance tongues. Peculiarities of
pronunciation observable in those Romance-speaking peoples whose ancestors
learnt Latin in an early age. (pp. 42-50.)
THE LATIN LETTER V G. B. GRUNDY.
CHAPTER I.
THE EVIDENCE IN THE KECEIVED TEXTS OF AUTHORS.
1 IT has been recognized for some time past by Classical scholars
in England that the question of the pronunciation of Latin in the
English schools and universities is one which calls urgently for
settlement. Two methods exist at present side by side, namely,
that which is called the old pronunciation, which makes no claim
to reproduce the sounds of spoken Latin, and the so-called new
pronunciation, which does make such a claim, but which never-
theless is not as yet uniform in many of its details. This latter
mode as adopted in English schools takes two forms: (1) that in
use in Germany ; (2) a form which pretends to greater scientific
accuracy, and which has been chiefly advocated by distinguished
Cambridge scholars. The Italian pronunciation, though at one
time adopted in some schools, seems to have fallen into disuse.
The evidence with regard to the pronunciation of the majority
of the Latin letters and combinations of letters is very clear ; and
the conclusions drawn from it do not require prolonged discussion.
But in the case of other letters, and especially of the vowel u, the
diphthongs ae and ?, and the consonants b and v, the evidence
is obscure. I propose to confine myself chiefly to the evidence as
to the pronunciation of the Latin v.
I am well aware of the boldness of the step which I have taken
in reopening a question which has for the last thirty years been
regarded as a res judicata by very eminent authorities in philology.
But the evidence which will be produced in this paper is novel in
form, and, to a certain extent, new in respect to matter. It would,
indeed, have been somewhat futile to reopen this question merely
on pre-existent evidence which had been already exhaustively
considered by eminent judges.
1 The assistance derived from published works is acknowledged fully in the
course of the discussion of the question involved ; but I have also to acknowledge
with gratitude important help received by me from Professor Rhys, Professor of
Celtic in this University ; from Professor Morfill, Reader in Slavonic languages ;
Mr. A. E. Cowley, assistant librarian of the Bodleian ; Mr. Sweet, Reader in
Phonetics ; and from Mr. de Atteaga, Reader in Spanish, who were kind enough
to assist me with information such as could only be obtained in a reliable form
from distinguished specialists.
THE LATIN LETTER V G. B. GRUNDY. <3
The nature of the new evidence is as follows. Late in the
eighties or early in the nineties of the last century (his work is not
expressly dated), Dr. Eckinger of Zurich published a hook of
about 150 pages on " Die Orthographic lateinischer Worter in
Griechischen Inschriften."
Dittenberger, the compiler of the well-known collection T
inscriptions, had already treated of the same subject; but the~
work of Eckinger is far more exhaustive, chiefly owing to the
greatly increased amount of material available at the time at
which he wrote. "With the exception of the pronouncement of
Professor Lindsay in his book on the Latin language, the
authoritative pronouncements on the question of the pronunciation
of Latin 1 were made before Dr. Eckinger's work appeared. Professor
Lindsay's references to the work show that he has adopted
Dr. Eckinger's conclusions without forming his own inductions
from Dr. Eckinger's evidence. Those conclusions are limited by
the fact that Dr. Eckinger did not compare the evidence of
inscriptions with that to be obtained from authors, and, possibly,
because his work was that of a young man writing an exercise
for his degree, a composition in which it might conceivably
have been imprudent to attack an immense bulk of existent
authority.
Inquirers have fought shy of the transliterations of ancient
authors. Mr. Eoby does, indeed, make use of certain statistics
which he has himself drawn up from them ; but he uses them with
so much reservation as to make it obvious that he regards their
evidence as being of little value, because ultimately unreliable.
This distrust is expressed in the following words : " All the
MSS. of these authors are, I suppose, posterior by many centuries
to the confusion of v and b : this would not impair their testimony
when they represent v by ov, while the change of ov into ft would
be in accordance with the tendencies either of pronunciation or of
its expression."
This is only a special case of the great general question which
must be present in the mind of anyone who prosecutes any inquiry
into the transliterations of Latin words by Greek authors. Is it
possible to attain satisfactory assurance that, in dealing with those
1 I refer especially to the views expressed by Mr. Roby in his Latin Grammar,
and to the well-known work of Seelmann on Latin Pronunciation, as well as to
the incidental but important statements in Dr. Friedrich Blass'a work on the
pronunciation of the ancient Greek.
20O02G7
THE LATIN LETTER V G. B. GRUNDY.
Greek forms of Latin names, we are dealing with the forms
employed by the authors themselves, and not with those employed
many centuries later by the scribes who copied the MSS. ? Unless
it can be shown, for example, that the transcription of Latin v by
Greek ft in the MS. of an ancient author is in accord with the
practice of his own time, there must always remain the possibility
that this transliteration is due to scribes who copied the MS. in
the sixth century or later, a period at which the Latin v is
admitted to have had the sound of the English v . So long as such
a possibility exists, no argument of any value can be drawn from
transliterations in purely literary documents, and Mr. Roby's
reservation is amply justified.
I began a collection of transliterations from literary sources
some years ago, but, faced by the difficulty of proving the evidence
to be contemporary, I desisted from further work on the subject.
It seemed as if no satisfactory conclusion could be drawn from
that particular form of inquiry. When, however, Dr. Eckinger's
work came into my hands not very long ago, I noticed a general
tendency to agreement with the data which I had obtained from
the purely literary source. I proceeded, therefore, to bring the
inquiry as near completion as possible, with a view to discovering
by the test of comparison whether the purely literary data, which
profess to originate at a certain age, are in accordance with such
inscriptional data as are without any question of that age. It
seemed that it would thus be possible to prove or disprove the
original character of the transliterations in the received texts of
ancient authors. If their original character could be proved, the
results promised to be valuable, not merely on the question of
pronunciation, but also with regard to the ultimate age of the
texts which are now extant. Reference will be made later in
this paper to the general results of this branch of the enquiry.
Before, however, turning to these results, it may be well to say
a word as to the nature of the evidence on pronunciation which
transliteration (or transcription) affords. It may be urged indeed,
it has been urged -that it cannot lead to satisfactory scientific
results, because it is of the nature of an argument from the
unknown, the pronunciation of ancient Greek, to the unknown,
the pronunciation of ancient Latin.
But the method is essentially a comparative one. It does not
take its premisses exclusively from the one or the other language.
It works by mutual elimination, enlarging the area of the negative
THE LATIN LETTER V G. B. GRUNDY. 5
and narrowing the area of the positive, until in the case of most of
the sound signs in the two languages something like precision is
attained.
Turning onoe more, after this brief digression, to the evidence of
Dr. Eckinger, I may say that I have completed his data by evidence
taken from those volumes of the Corpus of Greek Inscriptions
which have been published since his book was given to the world,
but, in so doing, I have confined myself to the record of those
proper names which are variants in respect to transliteration. The
constants, that is, those proper names the transliteration of which
remains the same in form from the time of their first appearance
in Greek literature up to the end of the third century A.D., are
satisfactorily established on the evidence adduced by Dr. Eckinger,
and, in point of fact, the evidence since available is entirely in
agreement with that cited by him.
For the purpose of the comparison of inscriptional and literary
transliterations the decisive evidence must be drawn from the
variants. Of the constants it may be stated that they appear in
the received literary texts in the same form as in the inscriptions.
Such instances of variation from the inscriptional form as occur in
literary texts are so very exceptional in some cases absolutely
unique that they may safely be ascribed to the error of a copyist.
It must be understood throughout this article that by "received
texts " is meant the printed texts (Teubner series, where not
otherwise stated) of the present day.
MSS. of the authors who come into question in this present
consideration are very rare in England, and, at present, I have
only had the opportunity of examining one, that of Plutarch's
Lives in the Bodleian Library. The collations of texts printed in
the Teubner series are, however, very full.
The variants in transliteration may be divided for our present
purpose into four classes :
A. Those which present two or more forms whose uses were
separated from one another by a more or less distinct cleavage with
respect to time : that is to say, when one form of transliteration
was employed, the other form or forms were not in use.
B. Those which present two or more forms which overlap in
respect to a certain period, that is to say, a period during which
both were employed, while before that period the one form was in
exclusive use, and after it the other form or forms were employed.
6 THE LATIN LETTER V G. B. GRUNDY.
C. Those which present two or more forms in contemporary
use, though at one period one form, at another another form was
more commonly employed.
D. Those which present two or more forms indifferently
employed at all times.
For the purpose of testing the dates of the transliteration in
the received texts, Classes A, B, and C are all of them important,
hut in descending order.
Thus far I have been speaking of variation in individual proper
names. But we must also take into consideration that wider form
of variation which consists in the diversity of the transliteration
of certain letters or combinations of letters at different periods.
This is much less precise as evidence, and therefore much more
difficult to deal with, save in the case of one letter, namely, that
with which we are at present concerned, the Latin v.
I will now turn to the evidence of the inscriptions with regard
to those forms of variation, and will compare in each case the
inscriptional evidence with the facts existent in the Greek texts
of certain authors.
The authors whose texts are of importance in this present inquiry
are Polybius, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Diodorus, Josephus,
Plutarch, and, with certain reservations which will be subsequently
made, Appian and Dio Cassius. It will also be necessary to deal
with the transliteration in the Oxyrhynchus and Fayum papyri.
The important period is that of the two centuries before Christ
and the first century after Christ ; and it so happens that the
period is well represented by authors whose subjects made it
necessary for them to transcribe Latin proper names.
Polybius' exile dates from 167 B.C., and the Roman portion of
his work, at any rate, was probably written about the middle
of the second century B.C. Dionysius of Halikarnassus and
Diodorus wrote during the second half of the first century B c. ;
Josephus and Plutarch during the second half of the first century
A.D. Part of the work of the latter may fall within the second
century.
The simplest mode of instituting a comparison between the
inscriptions and the received texts of these authors will be,
perhaps, to take first the inscriptional transliteration, and the
nature and date of its variation; secondly, to state the form in
which the transliteration should therefore appear in the texts of the
THE LATIN LETTER V G. B. GRUNDY. 7
authors cited between 200 B.C. and 100 A.D. ; thirdly, to state
in which form it actually does appear in the texts of those authors.
(For details refer to Table I, at the end of the paper.)
1. <&Xoowo5 as a transliteration of Flavius is not found in
inscriptions before 62 A.D. <J>Xa/3<o9 first occurs in the Augustan
period. In the authors cited it should not therefore appear before
Josephus.
In point of fact it appears in Dionysius of Halikarnassus.
Diodorus has the form <I>Xatm>s, whose date of origin is not
determinable. 1
In Plutarch the ov transliteration appears, as it should, according
to the inscriptional evidence, side by side with <I>Xa/3to?.
The ov transliteration is the only form found in Appian and
Dio Cassius.
2. Caecilius : In inscriptions Kante'Xtos, 250-80 B.C. ; Kat/a'Xto?,
68 B.C. 260 A.D. The eaiiier form should, therefore, appear only
in Polybius. In point of fact this is the only author in which it
does appear, though the form KauciXio? is also found in his received
text. The name does not occur in Diodorus and Josephus. In
Dionysius, Plutarch, Appian, and Dio Cassius the form Ka//aX<o9
alone is found.
3. Apuleius: In inscriptions the forms 'A7T7ro\7j<o9, 'Airo\r)io<!
occur from 120 B.C. to 30 A.D. The form 'ATrn-ovXi//*? is found from
14 A.D. to the second century A.D.
This name only occurs, as it happens, in Plutarch, Appian, and
Dio, and in its later form, as it should appear, according to the
evidence of the inscriptions.
4. Lucullus : The form Aev/coXXos is found in inscriptions from
88 to 30 B.C. The form Aow/cowXXos is later than the last date.
Neither form occurs many times in inscriptions, and therefore it is
possible that the earlier form was used for some time after 30 B.C.
In Polybius the earlier form only is found. In Diodorus the
later form only is found. In Josephus the earlier form appears.
In Plutarch the later form is common, and the earlier form only
1 All that can be said of this av transliteration for Latin av is as follows :
It appears quite early, e.g. Avianus, 'Awav6s (Cyprus, 31 B.C.-14 A.D.) ;
Avillius, Aw'AAios and 'AouiAAios (both temp. Tiberius) ; Flavianus, *Aau<ai/oy,
twice in second century A.D. ; Flavius, 4>Aauios, twenty-three times from first to
third century A.D. It is less common than aov. Dr. Eckinger seems to think
that it is of later date, but the hard facts which he gives fail to bear out
that assumption.
THE LATIN LETTER V G. B. GRUNDY.
occurs in one instance, which, as standing by itself, may be a
copyist's error. In Dio the later form alone is found.
5. Mummius : An earlier form Mo'/i/ito? appears in inscriptions
from 146 B.C. up to the. first half of the first century A.D. In
Plutarch the name appears as Mofifiiu^, in Appian as Moy/*/os.
In the other authors the name does not occur.
6. Publius : The earliest form in the inscriptions is IloVXto? ;
but a later form TlovTrXios appears in the time of Claudius and
Nero, and after this time the two forms exist more or less side
by side.
In Polybius and Dionysius the earlier form alone appears. In
Diodorus' text both forms are found ; in Josephus the later form
only ; in Plutarch both forms ; in Appian the earlier, and in Dio
the later form.
7. Lucius : Up to the time of the Christian era the form ACVKIOS
is the only form in inscriptions. A later form AOVKIOS then makes
its appearance. In the first century A.D. Aev/ao? : AOVKIOS '. ' 49 :
51 ; in the second century ', ' 34 : 66.
In Polybius and Dionysius the earlier form in ev alone occurs.
In Diodorus both forms are found, the ev being the more common.
In Josephus and Plutarch both forms occur. In Appian the form
with ev alone is found. In Dio the form with ov alone occurs.
8. Quintus : Earlier form in inscriptions is Ko'WT09, a later form
KwVVros not appearing before 50 A.D., after which the two forms co-
exist for a time.
In Polybius. Dionysius, and Diodorus the earlier form alone is
found. In Josephus both forms occur. In Plutarch the earlier
form occurs, save in one case, where a form in ov is found. In
Appian the earlier and in Dio the later form alone occurs.
It will, I think, be seen that the resemblance between the data
obtained from inscriptions and those obtained from the received
texts of authors is very striking. 1
When we take a test of comparison in which the instances are
large in number, I refer to the ov and ft transliterations of the
Latin v, we find a correspondence between the dated inscriptions
and the received texts which is far more close and far more striking
than any of the cases which have already been cited.
This dual form of transliteration makes its appearance first in
the second century B.C., though cases of /3 transliteration are rare
1 v. Table II at end of the paper.
THE LATIN LETTER V G. B. GRUNDY.
in that century, and the sum of the cases of both forms of
transliteration is not large. In the first century B.C. a much
larger number of ft transliterations are found ; and in the first
century A.D. and the succeeding centuries they are quite common.
But it must be accounted remarkable that the earliest trans-
literations of the Latin v which are extant, those of the first half
of the second century B.C., show both forms, though the ov form is
the one which prevails at that time.
We may now turn to a comparison of the statistics of the use
of these two forms in those inscriptions which can be dated, with
their occurrence in the received texts of authors contemporary
with the inscriptions.
In the second century B.C. the Latin v is transliterated by ft in
27 per cent, of the names which appear in inscriptions. But the
data are few in number, only 11 in ov and 4 in ft. In Polybius,
who wrote in that century, the ft transliteration occurs in 14
per cent, of the cases afforded by his work.
In the first century B.C. the ft transliterations as compared with
the ov transliterations amount in inscriptions to 34 per cent. In
Dionysius of Halicarnassus they are 30 per cent. ; in Diodorus
they are 36 per cent.
The case of Strabo is a special one. Yery few personal names
appear in his work. It is impossible to treat geographical names
as affording on this question evidence as reliable as that afforded
by personal names. The pronunciation of the Latin geographical
names of North and Middle Italy, of Gaul, and of Spain, the only
regions from which names un contaminated by Greek influence
may be selected, cannot possibly have been as well known as that
of the Latin personal names, which would necessarily be far more
frequent in men's mouths. Moreover, a geographer like Strabo
or Ptolemy would probably have recourse, and especially in those
regions, to such Greek maps as existed at the time. Strabo
might, indeed, be omitted from calculation on the question of
pronunciation.
In the case of the other authors I have confined ray calculations
to personal names. Still, I may state that in Strabo, mainly in
geographical names within the areas I have specified, the ft
transliterations- form 20 per cent, of all the transliterations of the
Latin v.
Turning to the first century A.D., the ft transliterations form
in the inscriptions 29 per cent, of the transliterations in ov and
10 THE LATIN LETTER V G. B. GRUNDY.
/3. In Josephus they are 31 per cent. ; in Plutarch they are
49 per cent.
It must be remembered that the statistics of inscriptions quoted
from Dr. Eckinger are taken from all parts of the Roman world.
There will be occasion to show that, had the data been taken
from Greece alone, the home of Plutarch, the percentage of ft
transliterations would have been considerably increased.
In the second century A.D. the ft transliterations in inscriptions
form 33 per cent, of all the transliterations in ov and /3. A com-
parison with the received text of Appian is impossible, and with
that of Dio Cassius would be misleading for reasons which will be
stated hereafter.
I venture to think that these data, and especially the close
correspondence between the transliterations of the Latin v in dated
inscriptions and in authors contemporary with them, lead to the
conclusion that th received texts of the present day go back in
respect, at any rate, to transcription, to a genuine ultimate origin
contemporary with the authors. It might seem, perhaps, on
general considei'ations, that transliteration would provide a fertile
source of error to scribes who copied MSS. at an age when trans-
literation had in certain important respects completely changed.
Yet the facts of the case seem to show that such errors have been
very rarely made. The exact significance of this consideration in
reference to the general reliability of the received texts of the
authors concerned is a question rather for the palaeographer than
for the philologist. The correspondence between the texts and the
inscriptions cannot be due to a series of consistent accidents. Nor
can it be due to deliberate acts on the part of the collator, for
most of these texts were collated before the evidence on this
particular question had been gathered from the inscriptions.
It is most satisfactory to find that modern editors have taken
very few liberties with the transliterations. I have not as yet
gone through the details of all the collations, but, as far as my
present experience goes, notes such as " Eerovpios MSS., ego
OvcToy/jtov," in the collation of Plutarch in the Teubner edition,
are, happily, very rare.
With regard to the individual manuscripts of authors in which
transliteration is common, I should like to suggest that trans-
literation may afford indications of the date of the originals from
which the extant MSS. are severally descended.
This is a digression from the course of inquiry in which I have
THE LATIN LETTER V G. B. GRUNDY. 11
been engaged, and, so far, I have only had time to collect the
statistics in Niese's collation of the MSS. of Josephus. The results
of this preliminary test promise that the inquiry will prove
interesting, and I hope, all well, to follow it out.
I think it may be claimed with some confidence that the
evidence here adduced dissipates the suspicion which has, indeed,
with some people become an assumption that the transliteration
in the received texts of authors of the centuries immediately pre-
ceding and succeeding the Christian era date from a period several
centuries at least later than the authors themselves. There seems
to be good reason to believe that these transliterations are in all
essentials contemporary, and that they therefore afford a reliable
basis for inquiry into the pronunciation of Latin during the life-
time of the respective authors.
CHAPTEE II.
THE TRANSLITERATION OF THE LATIN v.
The second century A.D. only provides us with two authors in
which the transliterations of Latin names are at all common, and
the received texts of both of these authors present peculiarities
which make it difficult, if not impossible, to draw from them
conclusions as to the prevalence of the two forms of transliteration
of the Latin v at that period. The evidence for the second century
must be taken from the inscriptions.
In the case of Appian the peculiarity is at present inexplicable.
It is a striking peculiarity, and, if original in the MSS. of Appian,
may possibly be very significant. It consists in the use of the
sign 8 to represent transliterations of the Latin v. That sign is,
of course, common in the texts of other authors, and is, so I am
informed, as old as minuscule writing in the MSS. of Greek
authors. But it is ordinarily used as an abbreviation of ov, quite
regardless of whether that ov is a transliteration of v or not. Its
use in this special and exclusive form in the text of Appian is, so
far as I have been able to discover, unique. That it is used in
some of the MSS. of Appian in this connection is shown by the
notes in Dr. Ludwig Mendelssohn's text ; but what I cannot
discover without reference to the MSS. themselves is whether it is
12 THE LATIN LETTER r G. B. GRUNDY.
used exclusively for this particular transliteration. The form is so
common an abbreviation of the ordinary ov that its existence in
the MSS. would not be necessarily noted in the collection of
variations of readings. It is possible that I may be able during
the coming Easter vacation to examine certain MSS. of Appian at
Paris and elsewhere. I cannot discover that any exist in England.
If the peculiarity in the received text is a mere convention of the
editor's own invention, it is a regrettable feature of that text. 1
Though it is not possible at this moment to make any pronounce-
ment as to this peculiarity, it may be well to call attention to the
fact that Appian's text shows a strong tendency to archaism in
transliteration, that is to say, to a preference for the earlier forms.
There is not an instance of the transliteration of any personal
names containing v with ft. In transliterating the proper names
Quintus, Lentulus, Lucius, and Publius, the earlier form is used,
though in all these cases the later forms existed in the previous
century, and are used by Dio Cassius later in this second century.
Appian's subject may have suggested archaism in form, and, as
will be hereafter seen, convention may well have had an influence
upon him. It must be noted that he was an imperial official ; he
served as procurator, probably, it would seem, in Egypt, though
possibly elsewhere.
The peculiarity of Dio Cassius consists in the fact that, whereas
in authors of the first century B.C. and the first century A.D. the
ft transliterations form from 30 to 49 percent, of the transliterations
of the Latin ;, in Dio they form but 9 per cent.
The case of the text of Dio Cassius presents less difficulty to
one who has examined the peculiarities in this transliteration
which are observable in the previous centuries. It is probably
to be explained by the life and career of the author himself. He
was an official and the son of an official. His father was governor
of Dalmatia and Cilicia. He himself was praetor in 193, and twice
consul, the second time in 229. Later he served in several
provincial governorships. Though the earlier period of his life
1 I have purposely left this passage in the form in which it was originally
written. Since I wrote it, Mr. J. D. Quirk, of Brasenose College, has been
kind enough to examine for me two fragmentary MSS. of Appian in the
Bibliotheque Natiouale at Paris. He reports that the 8 sign is ttot, in those
MSS., confined to ov transliterations of Latin r. It looks therefore as
if the usage in the Teubner text were a private convention of the editor of that
text. If that is really the case, I can only repeat that it seems to me to be
a very regrettable convention.
THE LATIN LETTER V G. B. GRUNDY. 13
falls in the second century, his historical work was written in the
third century (211-222). In his transliteration of the Latin v
he would naturally tend towards the official form.
Before making any attempt to account for the peculiarities of
Dio Cassius, it will be well to turn to certain original documents
of the first,' second, and later centuries, the Oxyrhynchus and
Fayiim papyri, so far as they have been published by Dr. Grenfell
and Dr. Hunt. The striking feature ahout them is that they
contain only two instances of /3 transliteration in such documents
as are dated earlier than the sixth century, and these are 2t\/3ai/o9,
which is found in a document of 325 A.D., and 2e/>y8ato9 in a
document of 288 A.D. Roman names attached to private individuals
are rare in these Egyptian documents, with the exception of the
name Aurelius, which is very common.
The following names transliterated with ov appear in documents
of the first four centuries A.D. :
IMPERIAL CONSULAR ONLY. NEITHER.
<p\aovio<i . . 4 times. 2e/>omos . 1 time. SaXou'torto? . 1 time.
Nepova . 3 ,, OveT-rios . 1 ,, Qvep<yi\ios , 2 ,,
2eOUJ^OO9 . . 6 ,, Oii6<TT6?l/O9. 2 ,, OviKTWp . .1 ,,
OveffTraaiavo? . 4 ,, Ovapiavds .1 ,,
OvaXepios , .6 ,,
OvaXeptavo? . 1 ,,
Ovrjpov . . .4 ,,
Of those names which are neither consular nor imperial, it is
noticeable that all, Salvistius, Vergilius, Victor, and Varianus, are
akin respectively to the names Salvius, Vergilianus, Victorinus,
and Varius, all of which are found on the consular lists of those
centuries.
As far as in/stances of usage are concerned, it is noticeable that
29 are in imperial and 4 in purely consular names. Only 5 are
in neither category.
The statistics themselves suggest, what is the actual fact, that
these names occur in the vast majority of cases in the dating of
documents by the years of the reign of an emperor, or by the
name of the consul for the year, or, in one instance at least, by
both. I am informed that this peculiarity of transliteration is
observable in the papyri at the British Museum which belong
14 THE LATIN LETTER V G. B. GRUNDY.
to these early centuries. They also, without exception, emanate
from Egypt.
In order to arrive at some explanation of that exceptional
phenomenon apparent hoth in Dio Cassius and the papyri, it is
necessary to turn to the consideration of certain general phenomena
apparent in the transliteration in authors and in inscriptions.
The phenomenon noticeable in Dio and the papyri, namely, the
rareness or complete absence of the B transliteration in the second
and third centuries, seems to be seriously at variance with the
data of contemporary inscriptions. It is noticeable that in the
inscriptions of the first four centuries A.D., that is to say, of those
which afford an ample number of instances from which to form
an induction, the /3 transliterations, as compared with those in
ov, show the following series of percentages :
1st century A.D., 29.
2nd 33.
3rd ,, 41.
4th 48.
In the first century B.C. the percentage is 34 ; but the instances
from which to form the induction are much less numerous.
It is worthy of remark that there is an actual set-back of
5 per cent, in the first century A.D., and a small increase of 4 per
cent, in the second century, rising to an increase of 8 per cent,
in the third, and a further 7 per cent, in the fourth.
Another phenomenon of a general character observable with
regard to the Greek inscriptions relating to Roman affairs is the
remarkable increase in their numbers at a time dating from the
age of Nero or thereabouts, and under the Flavian Emperors.
A comparison of the above phenomena shows that the set-back
and slow rate of increase in the /3 transliterations is contemporary
with and immediately subsequent to this period.
Now unless Roman ofiicialdom was exceptional among the
officialdoms which have existed in the world, it would tend to
develop convention in form in transliteration as in other matters.
In the particular case of transliteration this tendency would, of
course, be opposed, and especially in those Greek-speaking lands
where Latin was best known, by the antagonistic tendency to
transliterate by the native letter which most nearly conveyed to the
native ear the particular sound in Latin.
THE LATIN LETTER V G. B. GRUNDY. 15
Hence official convention could never develop a rule. It could
not develop more than a tendency.
A most marked characteristic of official convention is the
preservation of early forms. That ov is the earliest prevalent
transliteration of the Latin v is not disputed. Official convention
would tend to preserve this form, and official convention would
display an increase of power at a period when examples of official
documents greatly increased.
When we take into account also ordinary unofficial convention,
which would also tend to perpetuate the early predominant form,
we are able to appreciate the phonetic force which produced the
ft transliteration despite the strength of the tendencies by which it
was opposed.
The evidence that such an official tendency was developed,
apart from that of the papyri, which may, in a sense, be called
as witnesses in their own case, is somewhat strong.
I must preface what I am going to say by pointing out that
the names commonly used in the dating of years, i.e. under the
Kepublic the consular names, and under the Principate the names
both imperial and consular, would, if my hypothesis be correct,
display a preference for the ov transliteration.
In the authors up to and including Plutarch 24 separate consular
and imperial names and 47 unofficial names containing the Latin
v are found. Of the official names 10 are transliterated with ov
and 4 with ft. Of the unofficial 20 with ov and 20 with ft. Ten
official and 7 non-official names present instances of both trans-
litei'ations. As far as the number of instances is concerned, there
are 58 cases of official names, of which 66 per cent, show ov,
22 per cent, show ft; the remainder ov and ft. The unofficial
occur in 64 instances, of which 55 per cent, are in ov, 42 per cent,
in ft, the remainder in ov and ft.
It seems impossible to regard these facts as purely accidental.
The tendency in transliteration to adopt the ov form in the case
of official is obviously more marked than in the case of unofficial
names.
If we turn to the author Plutarch, in whom the tendency to
the ft transliteration is most marked, the evidence is still more
striking. A further reason for citing the evidence of Plutarch on
this question is that advocates of the w pronunciation of the Latin
v, well aware that his transliterations in ft constitute a great
difficulty in the establishment of their theory, have always sought
16 THE LATIN LETTER V G. B. GRUNDY.
to explain them away, usually on the ground that the trans-
literations in his received text are not contemporary with the
author himself.
I will first take the statistics of individual names, and then
those of the number of instances in which they occur in Plutarch. 1
Of consular and imperial names prior to Plutarch's time, and
containing the letter v, 28 appear in his works. Of these, 12 are
transliterated by ov only ; 8 are transliterated by ft only ; but, of
these last, 3 are names which, prior to Plutarch's time, appear on
the last occasion in the consular lists of 210 B.C., 223 B.C., and
125 B.C. respectively. Eight names are transliterated by both
ov and ft, there being 49 instances of ov and 31 of ft.
Of unofficial names containing v there are 25. Of these, 10 are
transliterated by ov only, 14 by ft only, 1 by both ov and ft. When
we take the instances in which these names occur in Plutarch, the
contrast is much more striking.
There are 243 instances of official names containing v. Of these
181 are transliterated in ov and 62 in ft whereas of 103 instances
of unofficial names, only 33 are in ov, while 70 are in ft.
The information in Dr. Eckinger's work only permits of calcu-
lations being made in the case of separate names. From his data
the following statistics are obtainable :
Percentages.
ov ft ov and ft
Official 21 ... 6 ... 73
Non-official 44 ... 37 ... 19
It can hardly be doubted that if statistics of the number of
instances were attainable, they would, as in the case of authors,
afford still more striking evidence of the official tendency. Never-
theless, it is noticeable in the above table that only 6 per cent,
of official names are found in ft only, whereas in the case of non-
official names the percentage is 37 ; and, again, 94 per cent, of
official names are found with the ov transliteration, whereas only
63 per cent, of unofficial names are so transcribed. Official con-
vention is, phonetically speaking, an artificial tendency. The
statistics show that even in the first century A.D. the natural
tendency was to transliterate the Latin v by ft. There are at least
1 v. especially Table IV at the end of the paper.
THE LATIN LETTER V G. B. GRUNDY. 17
two striking individual cases of the official tendency. The name
Valerius, the most common name on the consular lists, is very
rarely transliterated by ft either in authors or in inscriptions, and
its ov transliteration is very persistent, so that we find it so late as
the second half of the sixth century. Yespasianus does not appear
in transliterated form before the reign of this emperor, and is never
found in inscriptions save with the ov transliteration. A comparison
of these conclusions with the peculiarities existent in the Egyptian
papyri and in Dio Cassius will, I think, suggest that the peculiarities
in the literary documents are due to official convention. It seems
more than probable that the ov transliteration continued to be used
long after it had ceased to convey the true sound of the Latin v.
I must now proceed to call attention to another tendency, which
is not less clearly marked and not less important than the one
which has just been discussed.
In Dr. Eckinger's work is a table of statistics of the trans-
literations of the eleven names containing the Latin v which are
most common in Greek inscriptions, arranged according to locality.
This table I have supplemented by materials from the recently
published volumes of the Corpus. 1
These localities may be arranged in classes, according to the
knowledge of loth the Greek and Latin languages which we may
estimate to have existed in various regions in the first century B.C.
and in the early centuries A.D.
I put in the first class Athens and the rest of Greece ; in the
second class Rome, Italy, Macedonia, Thessaly, and Asia Minor ;
in the third class Thrace, Russia, the rest of Europe, the rest of
Asia, and Africa. The inclusion, of Rome in class ii is perhaps
disputable, but were it placed in class i it would have little
effect on the statistics which I am about to give.
In class i the ft transliterations are 61 per cent, of the whole,
against 39 per cent, of ov transliterations.
In class ii they are 36 per cent., against 64 per cent, of ov.
In class iii they are only 23 per cent., against 77 per cent, of ov.
It is, therefore, the case that the percentage of ft transliterations
is in a scale descending in accordance with the knowledge of
Greek and Latin which we may presume on satisfactory grounds
to have existed in the various regions in which the inscriptions
have been found. It is, perhaps, unnecessary to say that a
1 v. Table VI at end of paper.
18 THE LATIN LETTER V G. B. GRUNDY.
knowledge of both languages must be postulated for the purposes
of this calculation. I think it must be assumed that this
phenomenon is due to what I may call a natural phonetic tendency
antagonistic to that tendency of official and general convention
to which reference has been made. It is possible that this
tendency on its negative side aided official convention in producing
the peculiarities of the limited series of transliterations found in
the Egyptian papyri.
It is to this tendency that we must attribute the fact that
Plutarch, a native and resident in a region in class i, transliterated
49 per cent, of the names containing v in /3, whereas Josephus,
a contemporary, but a resident in a region of class iii, transliterated
only 31 per cent, of such names in ft. The revolt against official
convention is most marked in those lands where the two languages
were best known a fact which we cannot ignore in estimating the
phonetic value of the Latin v.
But we h#ve seen that the revolt against the ov transliteration
began, alike in inscriptions and in literature, long before the
Christian era.
The question naturally arises whether any phonetic law or
phonetic tendency can be distinguished in the ov and ft trans-
literations respectively. Dr. Eckinger, after consideration of the
facts which he has collected from the inscriptions published at the
time at which he wrote, sums up the matter as follows :
" We cannot argue the predominance of ov or /3 at a particular
epoch, or in certain places, or after certain vowels, except when
v comes between two t's, e.g. in A//3<o?. No rule prevailed for
either form : e.g. we find both forms upon the same stone. The
only theory which can be maintained is that /3 before or after
a became common outside Greece and Italy before it did in those
lands ; but in the second and third centuries A.D. the opposite
became the case, so that, for example, Greece at the time preferred
ft" (in this combination of sounds). " It cannot be said whether
this is due to some special pronunciation of the Greek either in
Greece or Asia Minor."
I have already produced evidence which suggests a modification
of the conclusions at which Dr. Eckinger arrived. The ft trans-
literation is undoubtedly a marked local characteristic in Greece.
The predominance of ov at a certain period and of ft at a later
period is demonstrable. The prevalence of the /3 transliteration
may be further shown from the inscriptions of Olympia.
THE LATIN LETTER V O. B. GRUNDY. 19
No. of
Names.
Names
in uv.
Names
in/3.
No. of
Instances.
Instances
in ov.
Instances
in j8.
1 cent. B.C.
... 1
1
1
1
1 cent. A.D.
... 4
3
1
9
3
6 1
2 cent. A.D.
... 8
3
5
20
3
17
3 cent. A.D.
... 7
7
23
23
This seems to indicate that at Olympia in the second century
the /3 transliteration was predominant, and in the third century
universal.
It must he remembered that Dr. Eckinger wrote under the
pressure of that weight of authority which had definitely pro-
nounced against the v sound of the Latin v at any time anterior to
the fifth century A.D. Also he had not at his cisposal the data
furnished by the recent volumes of the Corpus of Greek Inscriptions,
which deal with material from North Greece, from the Islands, and
from Olympia.
As to phonetic law, in the strict sense of the term ' law,'
I agree with Dr. Eckinger that none is discernible as determining
the uses of ov and ft respectively.
But phonetic tendencies are certainly apparent. 2 There is, for
instance, a certain general tendency in the case of Latin v medial
to transliterate by ft. This contrasts with the tendency in the first
century to transliterate Latin v initial by ov.
In the authors Polybius, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Diodorus,
Josephus, Plutarch, and Dio Cassius, there are fifty-five Latin
personal names containing v in which the /3 transliteration is found.
Of these i/'s eighteen are initial and thirty-seven medial. In
inscriptions used by Dr. Eckinger and those published since
Dr. Eckinger wrote there are fifty-six such names, in which the v
is initial in thirty-one and medial in twenty-five cases.
It may be well in reference to these statistics to call attention to
a consideration which must be borne in mind in estimating the
comparative value of the evidence of the inscriptions and the
authors on the question of transliteration. It is reasonable to
suppose that convention would have greater, and phonetic evolution
less influence with an engraver of an inscription than with an
author. To five, at least, of the above authors, Greek was his
native tongue, which would not by any means be necessarily the
1 The three names in ov are all official ; the other is not.
2 v. Table IX at end of paper.
20 THE LATIN LETTER V G. B. GRUNDY.
case with the engraver ; and, again, the less educated ear of the
latter combined with the influence exercised by examples in
previous inscriptions would tend to render him less appreciative of
sound modifications.
A strong tendency is shown to maintain ov before the so-called
' hard ' vowels, a, o, v, followed by a liquid.
In the first century A.D. we find in these combinations of letters
in Josephus and Plutarch eleven names with ov alone, one with ft
alone, and two with both forms.
In inscriptions of the same period we find five with ov alone, one
with ft alone, and two with both forms.
Before the vowels e and i followed by a liquid the tendency is
by no means so marked, and cannot indeed be said to demonstrably
exist.
The figures are () in authors, eight in ov alone, seven in ft
alone, two in both forms ; (b] in inscriptions, five in ov alone, one
in ft alone, two in both forms.
Before the endings -nis, -ia, -ianus, a tendency is shown to
transliterate by ft. The figures are (a) in inscriptions, three in ov,
seven in ft, six in both forms ; (#) in authors, one in ov, six in ft,
five in both forms. The modification of a w sound in proximity
with this Latin i, i.e. the high front wide vowel, 1 would be a natural
tendency. The raising of the back of the tongue to produce a to
sound would tend to decrease, and the sound evoked would be first
a bilabial spirant v and ultimately the labio-dental spirant v,
i.e. the v of English.
There are two other tendencies suggested by the statistics,
tendencies which cannot, however, be reliably demonstrated,
because the examples are too few in number.
The cases of v before a vowel followed by the sibilant s suggest
that the ov transliteration was maintained in this combination.
In the authors there are two transliterations in ov; one valid,
and one uncertain in ft. In inscriptions there are three in ov, and
none in ft.
The same tendency to maintain ov is suggested by the few cases
of v followed by a vowel and a labial. In the authors of the first
century A.D. there are three cases with ov alone, none with ft. In
inscriptions there are two with ov alone, and one with both
ov and ft.
1 Sweet's Primer of Phonetics, p. 107.
THE LATIN LETTER V G. B. GRUNBY, 21
I have spoken of phonetic tendencies rather than phonetic law,
in order to be free of the charge of drawing conclusions of a greater
precision than is warranted by the actual evidence. But these
indications of phonetic law become much more significant when we
consider that the evidence for them is obscured by the tendency of
convention (both official and ordinary), and by the local tendencies
of regions where the knowledge of both Greek and Latin was
defective, but from which nevertheless some of the data have been
drawn. 1
The existence of phonetic tendencies of this character must be
taken as indicating that the pronunciation of the Latin v in the
century preceding and the century succeeding the Christian era
was not uniform, but varied according to the sounds with which it
was combined, and must indicate, moreover, that the ear of the
Greek-speaking world distinguished these variations as being more
clearly represented in one set of instances by ov and in another
by ft : that is to say, the ov and ft are not merely interchangeable
alternatives, but actually represent different sounds.
Their apparent interchangeability in certain instances is due to
a cause which is not phonetic the struggle between the later
transliteration in ft and the persistent tendency of convention to
employ the originally predominant transliteration in ov, even in
cases where it had ceased to represent the contemporary pro-
nunciation of the Latin v in some particular phonetic environment.
CHAPTER III.
THE PRONUNCIATION OF LATIN v IN THE AUGTJSTAN AGE.
We are now in a position to consider the question of the
pronunciation of the Latin v during the Augustan age.
Many of the learned discussions which have been published:
on this subject treat the choice between the sounds of English
w and English v as a mutually exclusive choice. But the most
ardent advocates of the w pronunciation admit that this sound
became eventually a v sound. There is no evidence of such change
1 Dr. Eckinger's evidence on the localities of transliterations is by no means
complete.
22 THK LATIN LETTER V O. B. GRUNUY.
having been sudden or deliberate. It seems to have followed the
natural and usual phonetic course of an infinite series of modi-
fications of the original sound tending towards the sound ultimately
developed. It is difficult to express in satisfactory scientific
language the infinite series of intervening modifications, but it
is, at any rate, not misleading to say that, during this interval,
both the w and the v elements must have been present in the
pronunciation of the Latin v, the former becoming weaker and
the latter becoming stronger as time went on. No sane person
could for one moment suppose that the learned advocates of the
w sound are oblivious to this progressive series and its corollaries,
but nevertheless their discussions have an unfortunate tendency to
take a form in which the element of progressive development either
does not appear or is not given its due prominence in the problem
under treatment.
As far as the evidence of transliteration is concerned, Dr. Emil
Seelmann, in his work on the pronunciation of Latin, 1 expresses
himself as follows : " The Greek transcription of the v by ov or /3
deserves no special consideration beside the other evidence and
arguments for the determination of the sound." It may be doubted
whether Dr. Seelmann would have expressed himself so positively
had he had Dr. Eckinger's book at his disposal, and had he
compared the evidence of the inscriptions with that taken from
contemporary authors.
Professor Lindsay, in his work on the Latin language, has used
Dr. Eckinger's work, but confines himself, as far as transliteration
is concerned, to the evidence of the inscriptions. Mr. Roby, in
his singularly lucid discussion of the question contained in his
well-known Latin Grammar, does not ignore the transliterations
in the texts of authors. He recognizes that the /3 transliteration
is one which must be explained or explained away. He argues
that the ft of this period had not the sound of the labio-dental v .
He does not think that those who believe the ft of modern Greek
to have the labio-dental sound of the English v are right ; but on
this latter point his information appears to be second-hand. He
is of opinion, as it would seem, that the Greek /3 of the first
century A.D. was, and that of the twentieth century A.D. is, in
respect of sound, a bilabial v, which, as he very rightly says,
stands in as close a relation to English w as to English v.
1 " Die Aussprache des Latein nach physiologisch-historischen Grundsa'tzen,"
TOD Emil Seelmann, p. 241.
THE LATIN LETTER v G. B. GRUNDY. 23
It is my intention to discuss Mr. Roby's clearly stated arguments
after the conclusions from the evidence of transliteration have been
stated, because it will, I think, be found that such of those
arguments as are valid point to conclusions in accord with the
transcriptional evidence. But, as far as the /3 of modern Greek
is concerned, either Mr. Roby is mistaken, or a very large number
of people who have studied modern Greek, have heard it spoken,
and have spoken it themselves, are grievously in error, and this,
too, on a point which is of peculiar interest to the classical scholar.
I have been accustomed to hear modern Greek spoken at frequent
intervals during the last fourteen years, and I have consulted others
who have had opportunities, equal with or greater than my own,
of forming an opinion on the question. Neither have they nor
have I any doubt whatever that the modern (3 is practically
undistinguishable from the English v, that is to suy, is a labio-
dental v. Were the sound a bilabial v, the difference between
it and the English v would certainly strike an English ear.
There seems to be no reason to doubt that the ft of Greek had
originally the pure b sound. Whether the sound was still
unweakened in the fifth century B.C. is a very difficult question,
and one which only indirectly concerns our present purpose. What
we do know is that the sound developed ultimately into a labio-
dental v.
The series may be represented for convenience as b b v bv b v
v, understanding an infinite and progressive series of modifications
leading from the one extreme to the other. There is no evidence
whatever that a w sound developed at any point in the series.
ft must have represented some element in the sound of the Latin
v which the ov transliteration did not represent. The advocates
of the w pronunciation are quite agreed that the ov aimed at
representing a w sound. But it is probable that the sound
produced was not exactly that of the English w, but the w sound
discernible in the French oui. The fact of the transliteration
being o -j- v precludes the idea of a v sound in connection with
the v. The alternative ft transliteration must have represented
some other element in the sound of the Latin v, some non-w
element, if I may so call it, and as Latin v and also Greek ft were
both in process of evolution towards the labio-dental v (Eng. v), it
must have been the v element in Latin v which the (3 transliteration
represented. Surely, had this w sound revived in Greek in con-
nection with the ft the grammarians, who seem to have recognised
24 THE LATIN LETTER V G B. GRUMDY.
the sound as having been that of the original digamma, would have
noticed the reappearance of this sound in connection with another
letter. Yet they do not refer to such a phenomenon.
It has already been said that there seems no doubt that the
original pronunciation of ft was that of the English b. But it is
difficult, if not impossible, to say when it began to weaken towards
the spirant v sound. Dr. Friedrich Blass says: "That ft was,
during the Attic period, not v, appears sufficiently proven, in
case there be still any doubt, by Plato, who calls it a mute ;
cf. Thaeetatus, 2033. TOV &av fti/ra ou-re (frwvr) ov-re ^-o'0os."
The context is not unimportant: "I can only reply that * is
a consonant, a mere noise,, as of the tongue hissing ; ft and most
other letters, again, are neither vowel sounds nor noises." 1
Dr. Blass also adduces in proof of the b pronunciation the fit] fttj
of the comic drama. 2
But his argument displays that tendency to which attention
has been already called, namely, to take the two extremes of an
evolutionary series, in this case b v, in strong contrast, and to
ignore the infinite series of modifications of the original sound
which must have intervened between the two extremes. An exact
scientific interpretation of the passage in Plato is unattainable,
but there is nothing in it which precludes the possibility that the
modification of the labial the weakening, as it is called, of the
sound had already begun. Would Plato have called a b sound
weakening towards a labio-dental v a " vowel sound " or a " mere
noise " ? Nor is the fit) ft>j of the comic drama by any means
convincing. The mere presence of y in that imitative sound shows
that the Greek did not interpret it phonetically as we do at the
present day. Perhaps the Greek sheep baaed in Greek, or, possibly,
there has been an evolution in the speech of the animal !
In point of fact, we do not possess any conclusive evidence for
or against the weakening of ft in Greek of the fifth century B.C.
Such evidence as we have for the weakening of the sound is later
and is dialectic.
Dr. Blass 3 points to the fact that so early as the pre-Roman
period Lakonian employs ft in place of the digamma. He thinks
that the Lakonians themselves must have preserved the digamma
symbol with the sound, as the Herakleots of Italj did, had not
1 Jowett's Plato.
2 Cf. also Kratinus.
J Blass: " The Pronunciation of Greek " (Eng. trans.), p. 111.
THE LATIN LETTER V G. B. GRUNDY. 25
the appropriate symbol ceased to be indispensable owing to the
similar sound of ft. This last may or may not be the case.
But is it necessary to suppose that the sound of this late
digamma was a w sound ? In Greek generally the digamma
had been modified out of existence long before this time ; and,
indeed, there is a period in the centuries immediately preceding
our era during which we have no trace of it, though it comes
to light again about the age of Augustus. Had a sound which
suffered such drastic modification elsewhere shown no tendency
to modify in the Dorian and -iJEolic dialects ? It would seem
strange that a sound which had been modified out of existence
in Greek generally should have remained absolutely unmodified in
these particular dialects. Is it not more probable that ft in those
later dialectic forms represents a modified digamma ? In any case
it implies a pronunciation of ft very much weaker than the English b.
What form that weakening took is another question. So far
I have only been concerned in showing that such a weakening
did take place before the age of Augustus in fact, as it would
seem, long before that age.
It is very difficult to come to a very definite conclusion with
regard to this late digarama, and especially with regard to the
sound which it represented. The facts with regard to its history,
in so far as they are known, are, briefly, as follows. The sound,
or traces of the sound, survived in the historical period in JEolic,
Pseuda3olic, and Dorian dialects. 1 It is found in certain definite
localities in Lesbos, Pamphylia, Boeotia, Elis, Argos, Lakonia,
Crete, and Heraklea in Italy. But this late digamma is rarely
represented by the digamma sign F, but by some other letter,
ft being the most common representative.
In the JEolic and Pseudaeolic dialects 2 the ft transcription
of the initial digamma is found, but except before /> does not
appear to be more common than other transcriptions in r, 7, and 0.
Very few instances of these transcriptions exist. But before p we
have several examples of the ft transcription ; cf. ftpfrtap, ftpatSios,
ftpdcov, ftpaKia, the last two in fragments of Sappho. This series
points to a v rather than a w pronunciation in Lesbian, wr being
a peculiarly awkward combination of sounds. The intervocalic
F passes into v (cf. aitw? and 0ao9 with Lakonian aftws and
1 Ahrens : " De Dialectis .iEolicis et Pseudaeolicis," etc.
2 Ahrens: " De Dialectis Solids et Pseudteolicis."
26 THE LATIN LETTER v~ O. B. GRUNDY.
Pamphylian 0a/3o<?) or is dropped altogether.. In these JEolic
inscriptions there is no reason, as Ahrens points out, why the sign
of digamma should have heen changed, had not the sound itself
changed.
In the Boeotian dialect the initial digamma is retained until
a late date in literature and inscriptions to a later date than
in the .^Eolic dialects. Medial digamma is very rare, and between
vowels is changed into v or dropped.
In the dialect of Elis the actual digamma sign survives in
Pap^ov for ep~(ov, feTros, /"e'ro?, etc., and in faXrj'ioi for 'HXetot even
on coins. We find tf for digamma in B^Xews (proper name), fta&v
(^w). Before /> we find digamma in fpdvpa, but changed into
(3 before / in ftpardvav. 1
The most interesting case of the surviving digamma in the
Dorian dialects occurs in the Lakonian -Tarentine colony of
Heraklea, whose use of the sign suggested to Claudius its
adoption into Latin. In this case it is remarkable that the
Herakleots seem at one time to have cast it aside, when it is
certain that most of the Greeks made use of it, and at a later
time to have resumed it when in the remaining dialects and
cognate languages no trace of it is apparent. It is preserved in
certain words which are found in the Tabula? Heraclienses. But
there is a further phenomenon displayed by this late Herakleot
digamma. It makes its appearance in the numeral peg (eg) and
its derivatives, a word in which it is not found either among
the Greeks or in the cognate languages. There are, indeed, traces
of this pleonastic digamma in the Lakonian dialect. In that
dialect the late digamma is usually represented by ft ; and at times
we find ft placed at the beginning of words which had certainly
no original digamma. This would suggest an original pleonastic
digamma. Other transcriptions of the digamma in the Dorian
dialects are TT in Lakonian, which is very rare ; o in Cretan, also
very rare ; v in Lakonian, of which there is only one example.
In Hesychius many words which had the digamma are found
with initial 7. Ahrens regards this as an instance of the confusion
of letters.
It appears, then, that in the dialects in which this late digamma
appears it is usually transcribed by ft, less commonly by v, and so
very exceptionally by any other letters that we may consider them
as merely accidental representatives of the original letter.
1 Ahrens: " De Dialecto Dorica."
THK LATIN LETTER V G. B. GRUNDY. 27
Of the transcription by Ahrens says that two opinions are
possible : either that /3 with sound unchanged, i.e. with its
pronunciation at that period, took the place of the obsolete
digamma, or that the digarnma was actually changed into a /J
pronunciation. He prefers the latter explanation. Among the
Lesbians the digamma changed into /3 before initial />, into v after
a vowel, and this change was not orthographic but dialectic. Nor
can the change in the Dorian dialects be otherwise accounted for,
for it is not intelligible why the Dorians should have blindly
changed the sign if the sound had not changed. 1 Besides, why,
says Ahrens, should the Dorians write a/3u>s, when the Lesbians
wrote ayws, unless there was a difference in pronunciation ? Nor
do the most learned grammarians Herodianus and Heraklides
discover that the ft which took the place of the digamma had any
other pronunciation than that of the ordinary p.
To what date or dates are we to attribute this late digamma and
its transcription ?
The Italiots wrote an actual digamma until the fourth century
before Christ, and there is uo reason to believe that it became
obsolete among the Lakonians and Cretans before that date. In
the following centuries the Lakonian inscriptions (though we
cannot argue from them, because they do not exhibit any Lakoniau
peculiarities) and the Cretan inscriptions exhibit neither digamma
nor the vicarious letter /3. That vicarious letter is seen in certain
proper names in the first century A.D.
The disappearance of dialectic peculiarities from many of the
Greek inscriptions of the fourth century B.C. is due largely to the
fact that Ionian lettering was adopted in nearly all the Greek
states towards the close of the fifth and the beginning of the fourth
century. No p was preserved in this lettering, and therefore
those dialects which had up to that time preserved the digamma
had either to express it by some other letter or to revive the
digamma sign. But in the centuries immediately preceding the
Christian era, not merely the original sign but also its substitutes
disappeared. This phenomenon is curious, but is not apposite to
the present inquiry. The sound of the digamma certainly
continued to exist. The revival of the original or of some
1 Though Ahrens' arguments on this question are, as a whole, convincing,
it is not certain that this appearance of $ for digamma in the Dorian Peloponnesus
is dialectic. The change to the Ionian script, of which more will be said later,
complicates the matter in this region.
28
THE LATIN LETTER V G. B. GRUNDY.
substituted letter about the time of the Christian era cannot be
attributed to any archaising tendency to any mania for antiquity.
Both Ahrens and Tudeex, however, believe that this late digamma
was changed in sound from the original. The sound had survived
and been modified in the speech of the masses, but, after the fourth
century, had been rejected by the classes, so Ahrens thinks,
because of its roughness, and hence does not appear in inscriptions
either in the form of the original or of a substituted sign.
As far as the change in sound is concerned, transliteration affords
certain striking evidence of a negative character. The early
digamma had, as most authorities believe, the sound of the English
tv, or, as Tudeex asserts, the sound of bilabial , i.e. a sound
which may be best represented in English by the combination vw.
Had this sound remained unchanged in the centuries before Christ
we should have certainly expected to find at least some instances
of ov being substituted for it where a vicarious sign is employed.
ov is the transliteration of the early Latin v, whose sound was,
as it is asserted, that of the English w. But not a single instance
of this vicarious use of ov for the digamma is extant, though
a variety of such substitutes are found. Is it not inconceivable
that, if the Greek of the fourth and following centuries had been
seeking for a substitute for a Greek letter whose sound was that
of the English w, he should have failed to adopt in some instance
or instances that combination ov by which he transliterated a
Latin letter having the to sound? It is, indeed, wholly against
probability that this late digamma was a w at all, and therefore /3,
when it appears as its representative, cannot be assumed to be
representative of a w sound.
It is infinitely easier, in the case of this late digamma, to show
what its sound was not, than to show what it was. Tudeex says :
"The original pronunciation of the digamma could easily pass
into the semi-vowel v, or even into the full vowel." That it
did not pass into the full vowel v in the majority of instances,
is shown by the consonantal character of the substitutes employed
for it in later Greek. Even the Lesbian v, which takes the place
of the intervocalic digamma, must have been, from its very
intervocalic position, at least semi-consonantal. In the semi-vowel
v sound we are coming very near a v, or, at any rate and this
is the important point near to a sound which might, faute de
mieux, be transliterated by a letter containing a v element. The
variety of the representatives employed for this late digunima
THE LATIN LETTER V G. B. GRUNDY. 29
indicates that the representation was not, in the case of any one of
them, completely satisfactory.
I have dealt with this question of the late digamma at some
length, because its representation by ft has been used as an
argument for the weakening of the Greek ft sound towards a w ;
and it is the only evidence which can be employed to support
that argument. If that evidence breaks down, as, 1 think, I have
shown that it does, there is not one jot of evidence for any trace
of a w pronunciation in either the Greek ft or the Latin b, of
which it is the all but invariable representative in transliteration.
It may further be remarked that the confusion between the
Latin b and the Latin v, though found in the second century A.D.,
did not become common until the third and fourth centuries, that
is to say, at a time when, as even the most ardent advocates of
the w sound of the Latin v would admit, the Latin v was on the
point of becoming a labio-dental v correspondent in sound with
the same English letter. If the Latin b had developed a weakening
towards a w sound at an earlier period, why did not its confusion
with the Latin v take place at an earlier date ?
Eckinger, in noting the case of the transliteration of the Latin av
by a/9, says: "The Latin v must have sounded much harder to
the Greek than ov. He therefore sought for another transliteration
and chose ft, which was very natural, since it appears to have
had a peculiarly soft pronunciation in Greek ; cf. Ka-reaKeftaaa
(Lebas, v, 6, 1076, and C.I.G. 3693), Vipvftavaaaa (Lebas, ii, 4,
163), Ben/a*:? (C.I.G. 5513), etc." " Also," he proceeds,
"the Latin seems to have softened the b, and brought it near to
the v, e.g., in the second, third, and fourth centuries A.D. lavoratum,
livido, praBstavitur, sivi, desaBbisse, sibe, etc " Reference has been
made already to the transliteration of Latin b by Greek ft. Save
in very rare cases, so rare as almost to amount to a negligible
quantity, the Latin b is transliterated by ft.
The rare exceptional cases show TT as a transliteration, e.g in
the special name FloVXto* (Publius). That both ft and Latin b were
in process of weakening at the time of the Christian era, there is
no reason to doubt. The weakening of ft has been already
demonstrated, and a modification of Latin b which produced
a tendency to confusion with v in the second century A.D. cannot
have been of recent origin. We have, it is true, no evidence
whatever as to the exactness with which ft represented the sound
of the Latin b at this period.
30 THE LATIN LETTER V G. B. GRUNDY.
What, then, is our knowledge, as distinguished from our con-
jectures, on this subject ?
We know that the Latin b was tending in certain sound
combinations towards the labio dental v of the early Romance.
We know that the Latin v was tending in the same direction.
That is the extent of our actual knowledge. But, on these facts,
is it an unreasonable conjecture that the common element in the
sounds of these letters which caused them to be confused so early
as the second century A.D. was a v element ?
It was the medial rather than the initial b of Latin which tended
to weaken, as is shown by the evolution of the sound in the
Eomance languages ; so Dr. Eckinger's remark must be understood
as not applicable to the initial b of Latin.
We have, then, in Latin and Greek three evolutionary series of
sounds, whose extremities, at any rate, are not disputed :
1. Greek ft b .. v
2. Latin v (transliterated by ov and /3) . w . . v
3. Latin b (transliterated by (3}
where it weakens, i.e. in medial and final syllables,
produces three modifications in the Romance languages :
b v
^ /
b . . . . . . disappearance.
In all these three series the outward and visible sign of a common
element in the Augustan age is the Greek ft ; and the only traceable
inward, i.e. sound element which is common to all is the sound
which, in English, we represent by the letter v.
This ft transliteration of the Latin v has always been recognized
by the advocates of the w pronunciation of that letter as a dis-
turbing element in ttie premisses from which they draw their
conclusions. Various attempts have been made to explain it away.
Several of the most prominent writers on Latin pronunciation
have utterly failed to realise the seriousness of the fnctor. Dr.
Seelmann, in his well-known book on the subject, refuses to regard
it as constituting any evidence whatever up >n the question, and
dismisses the matter in one short sentence at the end of a long
discussion of the pronunciation of this Latin letter. When Dr.
Seelmann wrote, Dr. Eckinger's work had not been published '>
still less had anyone attempted to compare, as has been done in the
THE LATIN LETTER V G. B. GRUNDY. 31
course of this discussion of the question, the evidence of the
inscriptions with the evidence obtainable from Greek authors.
I venture to assert that this new evidence cannot be dismissed in
a few lines in any scientific treatise of the question of the
pronunciation of Latin, and that, as a corollary, Dr. Seelinann's
conclusions, which form the real basis of that which has been
written in English upon this question, demand reconsideration
in the light of the new facts. Even Professor Lindsay, in his
work on the Latin language, who had used Dr. Eckinger's work,
speaking of this transliteration, says : " But we find fi occasionally
even in the first century A.D." Can the word "occasionally" be
applied to a form of transliteration which in the inscriptions
amounts to 29 per cent, of the numerous examples, and in the
two authors of this century is represented in 31 per cent, and
49 per cent, respectively of their transliterations of the Latin v ?
Again, the words " even in the first century A..D." are most mis-
leading, inasmuch as this transliteration appears in the second
century B.C. both in inscriptions and in Polybius, and is quite
common both in inscriptions and in authors of the first century
before our era.
There is another explanation which has been commonly put
forward with a view to meeting the difficulty caused by this
inconvenient (3 transliteration. It is suggested that ft as a trans-
literation of the Latin v was merely used because it was shorter
to write and to engrave, and therefore more convenient than ov.
The fact of such a suggestion having been made shows the straits
to which the advocates of the pure to pronunciation have been put
by the presence of this disturbing factor in their calculations.
In the first place, it is obvious that the 'convenience' might be
doubted. Again, how are we, under this hypothesis, to account
for the phonetic tendencies which are apparent in the use of ov
and ft respectively in certain combinations of sound? How, too,
are we to account for the fact that the use of /3 was most common
in those regions where both Latin and Greek were best known, and
tends to decrease in accordance with a decrease in the knowledge
of the two languages in other regions of the Roman Empire.
Furthermore, under this hypothesis what a strange thing it must
be accounted that the authors of the first century B.C. and the first
century A.D., if they used the letter merely as a convenient alternative
for ov a form of use in which individual choice would be
absolutely free should have happened to employ it in percentages
32 THE LATIN LETTER V G. B. GRUNOY.
of cases which so singularly accord with the percentages which we
find in contemporary inscriptions !
Before taking the specific objections which have been raised
against the v pronunciation of the Latin v, it will be better, for the
sake of clearness, to state the conclusions which may be drawn
from the constructive evidence which has been adduced in this
article, the more so inasmuch as some of those objections are not
in conflict with these conclusions. The evidence of transliteration
clearly indicates that any argument for the original pronunciation
of the Latin v as a pure labio dental v (English) is at least as
disputable as one which maintains that the Latin v was pronounced
like the English w until a comparatively late period. The trans-
literation by ov seems to indicate distinctly that there was a period
in Latin when the sound of the v did closely resemble that of the
English w. There is a certain probability, however, that the
w sound was rather that of the French ov in ovi than that of the
English iv. 1 It is perhaps interesting to note incidentally in
connection with this French word that, in the Swiss pronunciation
of it, an initial v element is said to be distinguishable.
But, while admitting the existence of this original w sound, it
must be pointed out that we have no evidence relating to a time
when this sound was in a pure form in Latin. That evidence goes
back to the first half of the second century B.C. At that period,
though the ov transliteration seems to have predominated, the
ft transliteration existed. The evolution of the sound from w to v
had begun, and had progressed so far, at any rate in certain
combinations, as to be perceptible to the ordinary ear, and this, too,
especially in Greece, that land in which the knowledge of the two
languages combined would be most existent.
Before the Christian era, in the second half of the first century
B.C., the evolution had made great progress, and was clearly shown
in the transliterations of the time. The v element in the Latin v
must have been very strongly marked at this period for it to
overcome, to the extent to which it did, the force of the con-
ventional transliteration by ov.
1 The difference, so far as I can distinguish it, in the mechanical product : on
of the two sounds consists in this, that whereas in the pronunciation of the
English w (not icfi) the lips come into momentary and slight contact, in the
pronunciation of this French ov they do not. The difference is also marked by
the current use of ' wee, wee ' to indicate the English mispronunciation of the
French word.
THE LATIN LETTER V O. B. GRUNDY.
It is at least probable that it was this new element in the
pronunciation of the literal sign which troubled the grammarians
of the period, and especially those learned men whom Claudius
consulted as to the revision of certain elements in the Latin
alphabet. Claudius' proposal indicates in itself that even the
speaker of Latin recognized a change which would be far less
perceptible to him than to a Greek of that age, who compared
his own tendencies in transliteration with those observable in the
Greek authors of a previous period. This, again, would indicate
that the change had become veiy marked. A good deal of capital
has been made out of the fact that, under Claudius or by Claudius,
the JEolic digamma was suggested as the new sign for the Latin
v. But Claudius was seeking for a sign, not a sound. The ft sign
he could not propose to adopt, because it resembled the Latin b
too closely in form. It would seem that it was to the Latin the
changed sound and to the Greek the composite sound of the Latin v
of the age of Claudius which caused the difficulty. Neither Greek
nor Latin had any single letter which could represent the
differences in the sound of the old Latin v caused by the fact that
its evolution had been more rapid in certain sound combinations
than in others, e.g., more rapid before -ius than before -al.
The time has now come to make some definite suggestions as to
the actual pronunciation of the Latin v in the Augustan age, and
to compare those suggestions with the pronouncements of the
grammarians of the period.
The Latin v of the Augustan age is a sound in process of
evolution, and one in which the evolutionary series has made
considerable progress, though not, it would seem, the same progress
in all combinations of sounds.
I would suggest that there is no one English letter which can
by itself render the sound of the Latin v at this period. A com-
bination of the letters vw would in all probability most nearly
represent the pronunciation of Latin v initial ; that is to say, it
was a bilabial, not labio-dental, v. 1 Those who would argue for
the pronunciation 'Walerius,' 'weni,' 'widi,' 'wici,' ignore evidence
which, scientifically speaking, cannot be ignored. That evidence
points to a stage in the evolution of this sound which must at
least have produced at this period ' Vwalerius,' ' vweni,' 'vwidi,'
' vwici.' It is, indeed, possible on the evidence to go further
1 The bilabial v can only be represented in the English system of phonetic
signs by this combination of letters.
34 THE LATIN LETTER V G. B. GRUNDY.
than this, and to say that in the case of most medial v's and of
some initial v's the evolution had progressed more towards the
v sound than is indicated by the via combination of English
letters which has been suggested. Attention has already been
called to the fact that, especially in authors, the /3 transliteration
is more common in the case of Latin v medial than of Latin
v initial. I have already mentioned that, before the ending
-ius the ft transliteration is by far the most common, and
also that it appears at a very early date : cf. the A//3<os of
Polybius. It is probable that in this termination the i was
practically consonantal a yod sound, and in combination with the
following v sound would tend to modify the preceding v.
Phonetically the tendency may be expressed as follows. The
raising of the back of the tongue, an essential mechanical element
in the production of a w sound, would tend to disappear owing to
the difficulty, or, shall we say, inconvenience of passing from that
tongue position to the position demanded for the production of the
front vowel or semi-vowel i ; and the w sound would under those
circumstances be gradually evolved into a v sound. It is
probable, therefore, that in this combination the v sound developed
earlier and more rapidly than in the case of other combinations
containing the Latin v, and that, by the Augustan age, the w
sound in this particular Latin v before -ius, -ia, -ium had practically
developed into the v sound.
On the practical question of the pronunciation of the Latin v in
English schools I shall only speak with brevity. The pronunciation
of the Latin initial v as a bilabial v ( = vw as nearly as may be,
when expressed in English characters) would possibly be incon-
venient. The tendency is to choose between w and v. For the
Latin initial v neither is correct, and either is as correct as the
other. The choice is open. For most cases of the medial Latin v,
however, the v pronunciation would seem, on the evidence of
transliteration, to be far more near the truth than the pronunciation
with the sound of the English w.
THE LATIN LETTER V G. B. GRUNDY. 35
CHAPTER IV.
THE LATIN v IN THE ANCIENT AND MODERN GBAMMABIANS.
In the previous chapter I have attempted to show that the
evidence of transliteration points to the Latin v of the Augustan
age having undergone a modification of its original w pronunciation,
which modification I have ventured to estimate in general terms as
having been
(1) v initial to a bilabial spirant, which may be ex-
pressed in English lettering by the nearest equivalent, vw.
(2) v medial, especially before i, to something very closely
resembling the labio-dental spirant v of English, though the
closeness of the resemblance would tend to vaiy according
to the environment of sounds.
It now remains to consider the real and apparent objections to
this view which may be gathered from the works of the ancient
and modern grammarians. I say "apparent" advisedly, because
the argumeuts of recent grammarians have been directed against
the pronunciation of the Latin letter as a pure labio-dental spirant,
a pronunciation to which the evidence of transliteration does not
appear to me to give support, save when the letter is in a medial,
and especially in an intervocalic position.
The arguments of the ancient grammarians have been fully
stated in various modern works, and I shall confine myself to their
quotations, except in cases in which the context in the ancient
authors seems to me to modify or to cast doubt upon the modern
interpretation of a particular passage.
A summary of the arguments in three modem works Dr. Emil
Seelmann's "Die Aussprache des Latein" (1885), Mr. Roby's
"Latin Grammar" (4th edition), and Professor Lindsay's "The
Latin Language" (1894), will, I think, exhaust the objections
which can be raised to any view which does not accept the
pronunciation of Latin v in the age of Augustus as an English w.
It may be well to take the objections in the order in which
they are stated in Mr. Roby's Grammar, because they are there
expressed in a peculiarly lucid and businesslike form.
<5b THE LATIN LETTER V G. B. GRUNDY.
Objection 1. "The same letter v was used in Latin both for
a vowel and consonant sound. The vowel had the English oo
Bound. I$y a slight appulse of the lips ou became w. The Romans
were quite alive to the distinction. The Emperor Claudius
proposed a new letter, and Quintilian thought it would be desirable
to have one. For (he says) neither uo, as his teachers wrote, nor
uu, as was written in his own time, expressed the sound actually
heard, which he compares to the digamma. The later grammarians,
e.g. Terentianus Maurus, dwelt at greater length on this difference.
This makes it probable that the sound was rather w than French ou."
It is very difficult to give a satisfactory answer to this particular
objection, because the evidence cited is very obscure in its
meaning, and is capable of at least two interpretations, neither
of which can, in the present state of our knowledge, be satis-
factorily established. With the earlier part of the statement
everybody will agree. But the question is as to the element in
pronunciation which suggested the new letter in the time of
Claudius.
Transliteration points to the growth of a new element in the
pronunciation of the Latin letters at this period. Professor
Lindsay seems to think that the new element consisted in an
increased consonantalism in the prevocalic v (u], that is to say,
in the growth of a marked w as distinguished from an ' oo ' pro-
nunciation. He speaks ("Latin Language," p. 8) of "a large
number of words which in the Classical period, or the Empire, had
the . . . . w sound," but "had in earlier times the sound of
the vowels (sometimes of the half vowels) ; larva, for example, is
a trisyllable in Plautus, never a dissyllable." Again (p. 9), "On
the Monumentum Ancyranum we have IVENTVTIS (3. 5m.), and
in Virgil MSS. iuenis, fluius, exuiae, etc."
The evolution of the w sound from prevocalic Latin v (ou) is
so natural and so easy, as Mr. Roby implies, and the tendency
to prevocalic consonantalism of this sound is so strong and so
marked in all languages in which the sound exists, that it is
very difficult to imagine that Latin resisted the tendency until
an age immediately preceding that of Claudius. The citation of
the one word from Plautus is hardly convincing. Does Plautus
commonly deal in this way with prevocalic v ? Again, it is quite
conceivable that, in the case of two sounds so nearly allied as
that of the Latin v and the w sound apparent in the French out,
the distinction might not be customarily apparent in certain words.
THE LATIN LETTER F O. B. GRUNDY. 37
In the case of the words cited from the Ancyran monument and
from Virgil we have to do with that phonetic busybody the yod,
which was always apt to interfere with the affairs of neighbouring
sounds, apart from the fact that in all the above cases the v is
in juxtaposition to its kindred u. The peculiarity may be
orthographic and not phonetic. Professor Lindsay assumes a change
in pronunciation. The increased employment of ft in the trans-
literations of the first century B.C. also implies a change. The
assumption and the implication are both, in all probability, facts.
The /3 transliteration is almost certainly the outward and visible
sign of the change which Professor Lindsay assumes. But it also
throws light on the nature of the change. Its earliest and,
subsequently, its most regular employment is in the case of
intervocalic v followed by -ius. I have already pointed out
(page 34) that a w sound before this high front wide vowel would
be peculiarly liable to modification, owing to phonetic reasons ;
and therefore the change indicated by the ft transliteration is
most probably a modification of the w sound, tending towards the
front letter v. The same thing is, of course, far more strongly
indicated by the fact that the further Latin v tends to the pure
labio-dental, the more frequently does the /3 transliteration occur,
until finally, when the change to the labio-dental is a fully
accomplished fact, the ov transliteration practically disappears.
I have already discussed the question of the late digamma in
JEolic and other dialects, and I need not repeat arguments to show
that the proposed adoption of this letter more probably implies
a non-w than a w sound. Yarro, nigh a century before Claudius'
time, spoke of the v in vafer, velum, vinum, vomis, vulnus as
having a strong thick sound (" crassum et quasi validum "). As to
the exact technical meaning of Varro's 'crassus' and ' validus '
there may be some dispute, but, on the face of them, they are
infinitely more applicable to a bilabial v than to a w sound.
Again, the remark of Consentius, quoted by Professor Lindsay
(p. 45), to the effect that the Greeks mispronounced the v in ' veni,'
" v quoque litteram aliqui pinguius ecferunt, ut, cum dicunt
'veni,' putes trisyllabum incipere," pictures exactly what would
be liable to occur in the case of a people who tried to pronounce
a bilabial v which they had not in their own language. If anyone
doubts this, let them ask some English friend to pronounce an
initial bilabial v.
The passages from Quintilian referring to the proposed digamma
38 THE LATIN LETTER V G. B. GRUNDY.
are in i, 4, and i, 7. In i, 4, he says: " Aut grammatici saltern
omnes in hanc deseendunt rerum tenuitatem, desintne aliquse nobis
necessarise literarum, non cum Graeca scribimus (turn enim ab
iisdern duas mutuamur) sed proprise in Latinis, ut in his ' seruus '
et ' uulgus ' jEolicon digarama desideratur."
In i, 7 : " Nostri preceptores cervom servomque u et o literis
scripserunt, quia subjecta sibi vocalis in unum sonum coalescere
et confundi neqnit ; nunc w gemina scribuntur ea ratione quam
reddidi : neutro sane modo vox quam sentiraus efficitur. Nee
inutiliter Claudius -5<!olicam illam ad hoc usus f literam adjecerat."
Quintilian's reference to the ' preceptores ' in relation to this
maintenance of the antique os, om spelling after v, looks as if the
whole thing were merely a schoolmaster's trick to prevent boys
making mistakes in spelling. But the interesting thing is that the
v sign, which had apparently satisfied previous ages when it had
a w sound, no longer satisfied the age of Quintilian. Is it not
probable that Quintilian and his contemporaries recognized that
the sound of u consonantal in their time was not the sound
which would be naturally evolved directly out of prevocalic v,
i.e. the w sound, but a sound which could not be directly evolved
by the consonantalisation of u ? Therefore they felt that a new
letter was desirable. The unscientific speaker of Latin, on the
other hand, who associated the pronunciation of his own time with
a certain customary sign v, and neither knew nor cared whether
his pronunciation of the consonantal v was directly evolved from
vocalic v or not, refused the new letter. It is noteworthy that the
sign adopted by Claudius was not a digamma, but a doubly
inverted/, i.e. J.
Objection 2. The vowel o when following v (consonant or vowel)
was retained till the Augustan age or later, though after other
letters it had usually changed to u, e.g. servos, later servus, etc.
Compare this fact with Bell's statement : " When w is before oo,
the combination is rather difficult from the little scope the organs
have for their articulation (i.e. consonantal) action ; the w is in
consequence often omitted by careless speakers, wool being pro-
nounced 'ool, woman, 'ooman, etc."
With the passage in Quintilian in which reference is made to
this peculiarity, I have already dealt. But the phenomenon as
a whole, and particularly as stated by Mr. Roby, tends to support
my contention that by the Augustan age a change had come over
the pronunciation of v. This o survived till the beginning of the
THE LATIN LETTER V G. B. GRUNDY. 39
first century A.D. It then died out. It had survived, Mr. Eoby
says, because it was more easy to pronounce with a w sound than
was the Latin u (00). Its disappearance would, in this case,
appear to indicate a modification of the w sound of v such as
allowed the ending -us to immediately succeed Latin v without
inconvenience of pronunciation. At the same time I must say that,
though this argument is really in favour of the view which I
advocate, I am disposed to think that too great stress may have
been put upon the difference between the sounds of o and u in this
termination. Transliterations and other evidence show clearly that
the border-line between o and a certain u in the Latin language
was very difficult to define.
Objection 3. " The interchange of u and v ; cf. miluus and
milvus, relicuum and reliqvum." Miluus and relicuum belong to
an age when transliteration shows that the w element in Latin v
predomiuated. The other cases cited belong to the same or an
earlier age.
Objection 4. " v between two vowels constantly falls away,
not sapped by a slow decay, but, as it were, melted before the eye
and ear of the people. Compare amaram, amaveram ; audieram,
audiveram ; junior, juvenior ; etc This phenomenon,
repeatedly occurring, seems hardly explicable, except on the
assumption of the v being a vowel, or the closest approach to
a vowel."
This abbreviation had taken place in an age long before the
Christian era (cf. Lindsay, pp. 463-4, and also 53, p. 52),
i.e. at a period when, according to the evidence of transliteration,
v retained a predominant w sound. There are two cases cited by
Professor Lindsay (p. 52), viz. 'O/craio? (time of Augustus) and
2e^/9os, from Greek inscriptions. The latter is practically a unique
case, possibly an engraver's error. No argument can be drawn
from it. The common forms are 2eow///>os, 2ey/}/>os, SeyS/y/ao?,
which Dr. Eckinger cites as occurring respectively 123, 37, and
47 times in inscriptions examined by him. 'O/muos is a form
which occurs 8 times in inscriptions between 100 B.C. and 156 A.D.,
as compared with 'O/cTaovtos 16 times, 'O/cray3tos 12 times, and
'O/crawto? twice. I have not found it in any author. But it
illustrates the twofold tendency which is apparent in the two
centuries preceding the Christian era in reference to the inter-
vocalic v, especially before the front vowels i and e. The v (w)
either vanishes, or tends to harden into a v sound. In this particular
40 THE LATIN LETTER V G. B. GRUNDY.
name both tendencies developed, but the latter seems to have
eventually overcome the former. The ov transliteration is mainly
due in this case to official convention, especially after the age of
Augustus (Octavius).
Objection 5. v in Latin, except in very rare cases, never follows
short i.
Objection 6. Consonantal v is never found before a consonant.
Objection 7. No distinction between the names of v consonant
and v vowel in Latin.
All of these objections apply to an early age, and do not affect
the evidence of transliteration, in fact are in agreement with it.
Objection 8. "The labio-dental / differs from the labio-dental
v only as p from b, t from d, * from 2, etc With so
great a similarity between / and v is it likely that the Romans,
if their v was a labio-dental, would not have confused them, or
have noticed the resemblance ? Yet (a) no inscription substitutes
f for v ; and (b) the Roman writers, at any rate before the fourth
century, seem not to have noticed this close resemblance, although
(as was said before) the symbol /was borrowed from the digamma
to which the Roman v corresponded." Mr. Roby then quotes
Quintilian and Terentianus Maurus in support of the views above
expressed.
The question here is the distinction or resemblance between the
voiceless and voiced consonants, and the recognition or non-
recognition of this distinction and resemblance by the Roman
grammarians.
On this last point I cannot do better than quote a striking
passage in Professor Lindsay's work ("Latin Language," p. 72).
"The Latin phoneticians, who, as we have seen, are not very
safe guides on any point of Latin pronunciation, are especially at
fault here" (with regard to the tenues and mediae); "for neither
they nor their Greek masters seem to have carried their analysis
of sounds as far as the phoneticians of India, who had at an
early time discovered the distinction between unvoiced and voiced
consonants, and its dependence upon the opening or closure of
the glottis. The Latin phoneticians talk of p and b, of t and d,
of o and g, as entirely different types of sounds, produced by
different positions of the vocal organs." Professor Lindsay says,
further (p. 73): "In native Latin words the tenues and mediae
are not confused to any great extent It is perhaps
only at the end of a word that we find a real variation between
tenuis and media."
THE LATIN LETTER V G. B. GRUNDY. 41
It is possible that the difference between the pronunciations of
the voiced and those of the voiceless consonants, whether mutes or
spirants, was greater in Latin than, for instance, in English. At
any rate, the tendency to confusion between the two classes did not
markedly exist. Nor does it appear to be a noticeable feature in
Romance languages. It is, of course, the case that in Inlaut the
Latin tenuis passes into a Romance media, the media to a spirant ;
but that is by the operation of phonetic tendency, not the result of
confusion.
Objection 9. Mr. Roby cites the evidence of transliteration.
I have already discussed his views on this question, with the
exception of what he says with regard to the MSS. of the New
Testament. " The name Silvanus occurs four times (2 Cor. i, 19 ;
1 Thess. i, 1 ; 2 There, i, 1 ; 1 Pet. v, 12). In St. Peter Vat.
alone (against Sinait. Alex.) has 2t\/3avos, etc." In point of fact
this evidence amounts to very little. Eckinger cites one example
of the form S/X/Sai/o? in an inscription of 4 A.D. Otherwise it does
not appear in inscriptions of the first and second centuries A.D.,
except as 2tX<wai/ds. We have to go to the fourth and fifth
centuries before we get another example of the transliteration of
this name in ft.
As far as literary evidence is concerned, it appears in Diodorus
once with the ov and once with the ft transliteration. In Josephus
and Dio Cassius it has the ov transliteration only. I have not
come across an instance of it in the other authors I have examined.
It is a consular name (B.C. 2 and A.D. 156), and therefore the
tendency would be to transliterate it by the official ov. On the
whole the transliterations in the, MSS. of the New Testament are,
in respect to this name, in agreement with the evidence of
contemporary documents, both literary and inscriptional.
I have dealt with those objections which are not directly
answered in the constructive part of this discussion. A con-
sideration of the other objections raised by Mr. Roby and by
others would merely result in the repetition of what has already
been said.
42 THE LATIN LETTER V G. B. GRUNDY.
CHAPTER Y.
THE LATIN v IN LANGUAGES CONTEMPORAEY WITH AND LATER
THAN LATIN.
The transliteration of the Latin v in Old Celtic, Old German,
and in Syriac and Hebrew has frequently been used as an argu-
ment in favour of the w pronunciation of that letter. My own
acquaintance with three out of these four languages is of the very
slightest character, and in dealing with them I have relied on the
standard works already published, supplemented in certain most
important respects by information obtained first-hand from eminent
scholars to whom I have applied for information on special points.
A great deal of misapprehension appears to exist as to the exact
nature of this evidence. It has been cited again and again as
absolutely conclusive upon this question, whereas the evidence of
the standard works to which I have referred, and still more the
information obtained from specialists in these languages, show that
it is absolutely inconclusive.
The state of the case in Syriac and Hebrew may be dismissed
in a few words. The Latin transliterations in Semitic docu-
ments have been discussed by Dr. S. Krauss. 1 Dr. Krauss (p. 47)
states, on authority other than his own, that Latin v was not
pronounced like Dorian digamma or French v ; thus, speaking
on his own authority, he says otherwise, "the transcription
by waw (vv~) as in velum would have sufficed. The fact, how-
ever, that the majority of the borrowed words reproduced v
by Beth (b, v} indicates that in the Jewish mouth v sounded
somewhat more strongly, something like German w or modern
Greek /3," etc. All this would appear to tell in favour of the
view which I have put forward ; but, unfortunately I have been
informed, on the best authority, that no one of the documents used
by Dr. Krauss can be dated earlier than the sixth century, and the
majority of them are of much later date than that. They therefore
do not afford any evidence whatever as to the pronunciation of
Latin in the first century ; and thus the Syriac and Hebrew
witness is of no avail.
1 S. Krauss : " Griechische u. Lateinische Lehnworter itn Talmud."
THE LATIN LETTER V G. B. GRUNDY. 43
The appeal to the evidence of the Old Celtic has been regarded,
as conclusive on the question of the pronunciation of the
Latin v . At a joint meeting of the Philological Societies of Oxford
and Cambridge held in the Autumn of 1905 in the Hall of Exeter
College, Oxford, with a view to arriving at some agreement
on Latin pronunciation, a set scheme was presented to those
attending the meeting, about one hundred persons all told, and
the acceptance or rejection of the proposals was made dependent
on the majority of votes. On an objection being raised to the
pronunciation of the Latin v as English w, one of those responsible
for the scheme said that no question could be raised on this point,
inasmuch as the Celts expressed the Latin v in transliteration by
a w sound. That seemed decisive. But on the next day I ventured
to put in writing to an eminent Celtic scholar the following
question : " Did the Celtic language between 100 B.C. and 200 A.D.
possess a sound correspondent to the English v ? " The answer,
also in writing, was as follows: "The question which you ask
suggests to me that you know more about Celtic than you admit in
your letter : it is as to the sound of English v in Celtic from 100 B.C.
to 200 A.D. I can only guess that this sound was not there. It
would come in plentifully when vowel-flanked b was softened to a v
sound perhaps at first it was bilabial v, as in the German ' quick '
as contrasted with the English ' quick.' This sort of change may
be put down to the period of consonantal mutation, which most
Celtists have been wont to regard as beginning much later than
200 A.D. ; but I should say that the later tendency is to regard
it as beginning early, perhaps not so far back as 200 A.D., but say
400 A.D."
If this be the case, then the evidence of Celtic is of no avail,
inasmuch as Celtic does not appear to have had any means of
expressing the v element in the pronunciation of Latin v.
Professor Loth, 1 of Kennes, gives a still wider aspect to the
question. He says (p. 3): "In the absence of Brittonic texts,
aud by reason of the small number of Celtic proper names for the
first to the fifth century, and above all because of the radical
transformation of the accent, of the quantity and of the quality
of vowels, and of consonantism, in short of the organisation of the
word, there exists between the Brittonic of the early centuries
of our era and that of the ninth century a gulf which we can only
1 J. Loth : " Les Mots Latins dans les langues Brittoniques."
44 THE LATIN LETTER r G. B. GRUNDY.
attempt to bridge by the aid of the words borrowed from Latin."
To this eminent Celtic scholar, therefore, it would seem that the
data with regard to early Celtic must be taken from the Latin, not
those with regard to Latin from the early Celtic. If that be so,
argument from early Celtic to Latin is mere argument in a circle.
The question of the evidence of Old German is not quite so
simple a matter. Old High German did not possess the v sound.
Kluge says of the Old German w : "In the beginning of German
w had the strong vocalic sound of the English w quite a different
sound to what it has at the present time. Hence in A.S. and
O.H.G. w appears as o in Auslaut. When w developed into the
spirant sound of the present day cannot be said with certainty. In
Bavaria the change must have been completed before the end of
the thirteenth century, for from this time onwards the signs w
and b appear as of equal value, and indicate in the first place the
Germanic w, and in the second the sound which had developed from
the German as spirant J." l If O.H.G. did not possess a v sound, then
its evidence on the question before us is as- colourless as that of the
Celtic. The difficulty in the case of Low German is not of the same
nature. The question is as to whether the words of Latin origin
existent in Old English came into that language direct from the
Latin, or through the medium of Old Celtic or Old High German, or
both. If they reached the Old English through either of these
media, they reached it through a language which did not possess
the v sound. The absolutely indecisive nature of the evidence
from the Old Low German is well expressed in a passage translated
from Kluge (p. 283) : " The discussion of the Celtic elements in
English shows clearly how difficult it is to work out the Latin
influence which Old English has undergone. The possibility often
arises that the material in question may come to the Old English
through the Celtic. No one has as yet seriously considered whether
the Anglo - Saxon experienced a generally direct but specific
influence from the side of the Latin before the conversion to
Christianity, or whether it is not the case that the old stratum
English loan-words from the Latin refer back necessarily to the
Celtic."
It is unfortunate, but it is the fact, that the languages
contemporary with Latin afford us no clue whatever to the
pronunciation of this important and puzzling Latin letter.
1 Kluge in II. Paul's " Grundriss der Germanischen Philologie."
THK LATIN LETTER v G. B. GRUNDY. 45
The history of the development of the sound of the Latin v in the
Romance descendants of the Latin language is peculiarly interesting,
but presents problems of special difficulty. It must be premised
that the question of the pronunciation of v is in this area of
investigation inseparable from that of the pronunciation of b.
A consideration of the relations existing between these two sounds
in Latin itself might well lead one to suspect that such would
be the case in the languages descended from the Latin.
There are certain obvious factors to be taken into account in
estimating the causes which have produced the wide differences
which exist between the Romance descendants of the parent Latin.
Differences of race, differences of climate, differences in the environ-
ment of daily life have played a great part. Modifications have
been introduced into certain regions by the invasion of speakers of
non-Latin tongues. All these elements in the calculation are well
known, and have been taken into account by students of Romance.
But there is a further element to which I should like to call
attention, which must, I think, play an important part in the
calculation, especially in relation to the question with which I am
now concerned. We cannot, as it seems to me, leave out of our
calculation the approximate date at which the linguistic ancestors
of the speakers of a Romance tongue first became acquainted with
the Latin language. Latin was in process of apparently rapid
evolution, in respect especially to the pronunciation of certain
elements, between 200 B.C. and 200 A.D., and the Latin which the
inhabitants of the Spanish peninsula and Narbonensis first learnt
in the early half of the second century before Christ was in certain
respects very different from the Latin which the middle and northern
Gauls acquired about the time of the Christian era, and still more
widely separated from the Latin which Trajan's colonists canned
with them to Dacia. It seems to amount to a law of nature that
all languages, 'whether indigenous or imported, are at all times
in process of modification with respect to sound ; but it is also
a well-known fact that speakers of an imported language, especially
if it be the language of a politically superior race, tend to resist
modification of the tongue as they originally learnt it, and thus
the development of a language is consciously retarded in a region
in which it was not originally spoken, whereas it is allowed full
play in a region in which it is native. Cteteris paribus, the
linguistic ancestors of the Spanish, Catalan, and Provencal would
tend to a pronunciation of the Latin tongue more antique than
46 THE LATIN LETTER V G. B. GRUNDY.
that of the other races of the empire, who learnt the language
at a later date, or than that of the Italian, who had, outside the
select literary circle, no motive for conscious resistance to the
natural development of what had become his native tongue.
It is, of course, true that the evidence of the Romance languages
on the pronunciation of Latin is of indeterminate value, chiefly
because, in the case of most of them, their full development in
early mediaeval times is unknown to us. Still, it is evident that
the Latin sounds indicated by the letters b and v had, on the
whole, a common development in most of the Romance tongues, the
general tendency being in the case of b to retain the original sound
of b initial and to evolve a v sound out of b medial. In this
evolution the Romance tongues seem to have merely inherited an
evolution which had taken place in Latin itself, in those parts of
the empire, at any rate, in which an archaizing tendency did not
prevail. Also, Latin v is generally admitted to have become a labio-
dental in most parts of the empire before Latin had developed into
Romance forms. The pure to sound of the old Latin v has not
survived in any of the Romance languages, except, perhaps, in
Sardinian. Though, owing to the evolution in the sound of that
letter within Latin itself, the facts with regard to its pronunciation
in the individual Romance tongues are not very pertinent to our
present subject, still it may be well to summarise the facts with
regard to the pronunciation of the present day.
The critical question in relation to our present investigation is
not concerned with the existence of a labio-dental pronunciation
of v. That is accounted for by the general tendency of the
evolution of the letter within Latin itself. The element which
demands consideration is what may be called the non-labio-dental
pronunciation of v in certain Romance tongues. In French, of
course, the v is labio-dental. 1 A w sound seems to have existed
in mediaeval French in connection with the semi-vowels , v, and
que, qui were pronounced qwe, qwi so late as the twelfth century.
We have noticed, too, the w sound of' the French oui. But in
no case is a w element in this language to be traced to either
of the Latin letters b or v. In the Italian groups a w element is
said to be apparent in the Sardinian pronunciation of the Latin v,
otherwise the v is labio-dental in this group. In the peculiar
Raetian Romance dialect, which is still spoken in the Alpine
1 H. Suchin: " Die Franzosische u. Provenzalische Sprache m. ihrer
Mundarten."
THE LATIN LETTER V G. B. GRUNDY. 47
districts of the upper Rhine, the v is labio-dental where it survives.
The case of its disappearance may be stated here. Dr. Gartner
says: "v, einmal auch /" (bei foras) verschwindet oder vergrobert
sieh vor dunklen Vocalen, zb. bei ex-volare." l Of this last word
he gives the following forms in the local Ra?tian dialects : zgula,
zvole'r, zgolar, zulp, zore, anzora, zolp, zvuah!, zvola.
Before passing to the Romance groups of the Iberian peninsula,
we may consider the case of Provengal, that language which,
both in respect to its geographical position and its linguistic
characteristics, forms the central point of the great Romance
triangle of the French, Italian, and Iberian groups.
The case of Provencal offers some difficulty to the student
who is not a specialist in this language, because the presence of
a distinct w element in the pronunciation of the Provencal
descendant of the Latin v is asserted by some authorities. This
assertion appears to be an error. I am assured by one to whom
the Proven9al is well known as a spoken language that the v is
a labio-dental spirant.
In Provencal, as in French, the voiced mute b when intervocal
was evolved into the voiced spirant v. But this v, as well as that
derived from the Latin v, passes in ProvenQal into a u when after
a vowel and in the Auslaut of a syllable or word; e.g., liura,
libram ; viure, vivere. It is noticeable that in cases in which the
Germanic w has been received into Provenqal, it has been treated
as in French : warden becomes Prov. guardar, Fr. guarder. The
u after the g vanishes in Provenqal during the tenth, in French
during the twelfth century. It is certainly curious that, if
Proven gal retained a w sound descended from Latin v, this German
w sound, for such it was at that date, was not expressed by the
Provengal v.
In the Iberian group the evolution of the Latin letters b and v
has varied. In Portuguese v has (in rare cases apparently) passed
into /, vehementia femen<ja ; often into b, venitta btta, etc. ;
once into m, veturnus modorra. In a few cases vo, vu initial
have passed into go, cf. vulpecla, golpelha.
But in Portuguese the v appears to be a labio-dental spirant,
both when it is a survival of the Latin v and when it represents
some other Latin letter. Latin v does not appear to survive in the
language in any form containing a w element.
1 Theodor Gartner : " Grammatik der Ratoromanischen Mundarten."
48 THE LATIN LETTER V G. B. GRUNDY.
In Spanish and Catalan the case is different, and in a certain
sense strikingly different. In the first place, b and v in Spanish
are identical in sound, though distinguished, sometimes incorrectly,
in writing. 1
Educated Spaniards distinguish a small difference between the
respective pronunciations of the two letters, b has softened towards
v, and v has hardened towards b ; but still the pronunciation of b
is said to be slightly harder than that of v. But the most
interesting feature of the language for the purpose of our present
consideration is that v has not become a labio-dental, but is a bi-
labial. The line of division in Spanish between the bilabial and
the labio-dental is not, as in most Romance languages, between b
and v, but between v and/.
In Catalan the matter is not so simple, because we have to deal
with three related sounds, namely, b, b', and v. b' is related to b,
and is, apparently, a modification of the b sound which occurs
between two vowels which are either in the same word, or in two
words which are not separated in respect to pronunciation. 2
" In the greater part of the Catalan region v and b have been
mingled together. In Barcelona and Valentia (for example) ' la
vaca' becomes 'la b'aca.' At other points on the Mediterranean, in
Reus, Tarragona, Castillon, Alicante, on the contrary, according
to the witness of the grammarians, the v in ' vida,' or that v which
has sprung from intervocalic b, is carefully distinguished from the
mute b and the fricative b', and has the same value as in French.
This v is therefore labio-dental. In the Balearic Isles and in
Alghero the v in Auslaut has in some cases become f, e.g. escrif
(escrivo). This v must also have been labio-dental.
Of the three letters the b' is, for our present purpose, the most
interesting. " b' gives the ear the impression of a v, but of
a bilabial sound, as was the v in vulgar Latin." 3
In the Human tongue the v is labio-dental.
It is practically impossible to draw any conclusion with regard
to the pronunciation of the Latin v from a consideration of the
pronunciation of its lineal descendant in any one of these Romance
tongues. The fact that v is a labio-dental in the case of most of
them merely suggests the labio-dental character of the v of late
1 G. Baist: " Grammatik der Spanischen Sprache."
* Morel-Fatio & SaroVhandy : " Grammatik der Katalanischen Sprache."
3 Morel-Fatio, etc. : op. cit.
THE LATIN LETTER V G. B. GRUNDY. 4'.
Latin, about which there exists no real dispute. In itself it throws
no light upon the pronunciation of the letter in the Augustan age.
But when we take the whole group of Romance languages in our
survey, they appear to be divisible into two groups on a certain
fundamentum division, or, perhaps, on a dual basis of division,
which, however, result in groups which are identical. This
dual basis is :
(a) The labio-dental character of the sound descended
from the Latin v.
(b) The labio-dental character of the v sound descended
from Latin intervocalic b.
These two labio-dental characteristics seem to be present in Italian,
Raetian, French, Human, and Portuguese.
In the other Romance tongues there are actual or reported
divergencies. In ProvenQal a w element is said to be existent in
the pronunciation of v, though the evidence on this point seems
more than doubtful. Prove^al pronunciation must have been
considerably affected by the French.
In Sardinia the w element in the pronunciation of v is definitely
stated to exist.
In Catalan, though the labio-dental v exists, intervocalic b (b'}
has become a bilabial spirant. In Spanish no labio-dental v exists,
both b and v being pronounced almost like the English b, i.e. v is
bilabial.
It is, at any rate, remarkable that the exceptions to the usual
labio-dental sound of the original or evolved v of the Romance
languages should occur in those regions, and in those regions only,
which by the process of Roman conquest acquired a knowledge
of the Latin tongue at a period considerably anterior to the
Christian era. It suggests that the Latin v, and indeed the Latin
b, with which these regions first became acquainted was not
identical in sound with that v which Middle and Northern Gaul,
Lusitania, Rsetia, and Dacia learnt to know in the Augustan age or
later. I lay down no law : the factors in the calculation, though
known, are so incalculable in their effect that it would be absurd
to claim a knowledge of the exact effect of the particular factor
presented by the date at which those speakers of a Romance tongue
learnt that language which they were destined later to adopt as
their own. But it must be accounted to be at least a remarkable
coincidence that the Romance tongues of earlier origin display this
50 THE LATIN LETTER V B. G. GRTJNDY.
peculiar characteristic, in contrast with those whose origin is of
later date a characteristic, moreover, which accords with the
evidence afforded both by transliteration and by the movement of
the time of Claudius as to the perceptible nature of the change
which had taken place by the date of the Christian era or there-
abouts in the pronunciation of the Latin letter. The tendency
of those provincials who had learnt the Latin of the second
century would be to maintain its pronunciation, that is to say,
to resist the natural course of development which the language
underwent in the two centuries before Christ within the area
of Italy itself. Hence the early prevalent w pronunciation of
v was preserved in these regions long after it had become modified
in the native land of the Latin tongue, and hence we find even
now, after the lapse of 2,000 years, that the development of that
sound of the Latin is in some respect or other in an earlier stage in
these lands than in the other parts of Europe where Romance
tongues are spoken.
TABLE I.
SPECIAL NAMES IN INSCRIPTIONS AND
IN AUTHORS.
52
THE LATIN LETTER v G. B. GRUNDY.
B
Sif
1 !
:
O oo g
3
O . C3
^
cs
II
*
Q
i
M
if
<
^
:
^ <3 p
Cr
^
IS"
S .5 <
I
t$
^
o
"S -^
^
&
e
M
f
i3T
o'
1
.0
j j jS
s
2 ^'S
HO S
p co
i
1 j
^
2
s
M
1
O O V O)
^^ ^^ '
^K
<
g 0-5-
o
W < 'g
4i
p
111
J
-s>
p
e
Ssf
S a
Ids
a a
POLYBIUS
(cired
150 B.C.).
o o
-il
Jj
p
AWTQ'TJO?.
o
d
<o
p'
p
i
||
do
o oS
P
00
*'S
S
? '
t9
4
o
i
5
II
l|
1.
22
10 oo
<M CO
o2
CO
&
<yT O
^* ^
/<
&- Cf
Cr ^-^,
O ^
Cf~ ft
S Qi
2 *>
^ <*
o p
-fa
B ^i
v 3
~K~ ^
o E
u
H v a
1|
THE LATIN LETTER V O. B. GRUNDY.
53
.1
lit
5
!
o
E
<J<!^
<
M
.
o
1
o
Q
O
o
2
-5
h
o
'0
a
J
"U
-8
*
E
DH
<
J
So O
^
. o
*, .
\.
-Mil
'1
^ 1 8
141
Hi
w
E E
5^
< <
<! <
C*
S
1
1'i
S
33
1
II
E
?*fr
< <
<
o
2
"j
. i
1.1
JJ I |
11
(
-o o
<u ^ o
EE
PH
< <
^
o
5
b
|
-o
E
o
M
o
*
.b
6
-E
-S
E
<
M
e
: p
a
13 ^
tH gj
9 . *
Q *"""* ^
^ *~
'a ^
*
SH
P
Mo' / w / o9, 146 B.c.-first h
1st cent A.D.
Mov / H / uo9, later than abc
noVX<o9, early form, but
nion in 1 st and 2nd cer
r7oi;7rXo9, temp. Claudiu
Nero onward.
'PoT/X<09, 105B.C.-30 A.
'Poim'Xtos, 84-243 A.D.
AevKios, practically sole
up to Christian era.
1st cent. A.D.
AevKio? : AOVKIOS :: 1
2nd cent. A.D.
Aevicios '. AOVKIOS '.'. 1
AeVTXo9, instances seconc
of 1st cent. B.C. anc
half of 1st cent. A.D.
KO'WTOV, earlier form.
Kw'j/T09, not before 50 A
54
THE LATIN LETTER F G. B. GRUNBY.
TABLE II. THE ov AND /3 TRANSLITERATIONS.
INSCRIPTIONS.
POLY-
BIUS.
DlONYS.
HALIC.
Dio-
DORU8.
Jo-
SEPHUS.
PLU-
TARCH.
Instances.
Per-
centages.
Per-
centages.
Per-
centages.
Per-
centages.
Per-
centages.
Per-
centages.
ov
P
ov
P
ov
ft
ov
ft
ov
ft
ov
ft
ov
ft
3rd cent. B.C.
2
-
-
2nd cent. B.C.
11
4
73
27
86
14
1st cent. B.C.
27
14
66
34
70
30
64
36
1st cent. A.D.
130
54
71
29
69
31
51
49
2nd cent. A.D.
312
150
67
33
3rd cent. A.D.
158
110
69
41
4th cent. A.D.
32
29
52
48
TABLE III. OFFICIAL NAMES IN AUTHORS TIP TO 100 A.D.
SEPARATE NAMES.
TRANSLITERATION OF THESE NAMES
IN THE SEVERAL AUTHORS.
No.
Instances.
Percentages.
No.
ov
ft
ov&P
ov
ft
ov&P
ov
ft
ov &p
OFFICIAL ...
24
10
4 1
10
58
38
13
7
66
55
22
12
NON-OFFICIAL
46
20 *
20 s
7
C4
35
27
2
42
3
TABLE IV. OFFICIAL NAMES IN PLUTARCH.
Instances.
Percentages.
ov
P
ov
ft
OFFICIAL NAMES
181
62
74
26
NON- OFFICIAL NAMES
33
70
32
68
1 Of which 3 in ov in Dio Cassius. 2 Of which 1 in p in Dio Cassius.
3 Of which 6 in ov in Dio Cassius.
THE LATIN LETTER V G. B. GRUNDY. 55
TABLE V. OFFICIAL NAMES IN INSCRIPTIONS NOTED IN ECKINGER.
Percentages.
ov
ft
ov & ft
OFFICIAL NAMES
21
6
73
NON- OFFICIAL NAMES
44
37
19
N.B. In this table the number of names, not the number of instances of their
occurrence, is given. In the case of official names included under ' ov & /3,' the
number of instances of ov transliteration is infinitely larger than the number of
transliterations into y3.
TABLE VI. GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION OF ov AND /3 TRANS-
LITERATION OF ELEVEN MOST COMMON NAMES.
Class I : Athens and Greece.
Class II : Rome and Italy, Macedonia, Thessaly, Asia Minor.
Class III : Thrace, Russia, rest of Europe, rest of Asia, Africa.
Percentages.
Class I.
Class II.
Class III.
ov
39
64
77
ft
61
36
33
TABLE VII. INSCRIPTIONS OF OLYMPIA : ov AND /3
TRANSLITERATION.
No. of
Names.
Names
with ov.
Names
with ft.
No. of
Instances.
Instances
of ov.
Instances
of ft.
1st cent. B.C.
1
1
1
1
1st cent. A.D.
4
3 1
li
9
3
6
2nd cent. A.D.
8
3
5
20
3
17
3rd cent. A.D.
7
1
23
23
The 3 names in ov are all of them official. The name in /3 is not.
56
THE LATIN LETTER F
B. GRUKDY.
TABLE VIII. LATIN F, INITIAL AND MEDIAL.
Total No. of
Names
transliterated
/3 initial.
ft medial.
by/3.
AUTHORS
Polybius
1
1
Dionysius Halic.
5
2
3
Diodorus
6
2
4
Josephus
6
1
5
Plutarch
33
13
20
Dio Cassius ...
4
4
55
18
37
INSCRIPTIONS
Up to 2nd cent. A.D. (Eckinger)
Since Eckinger
48 27
8 4
21
4
TABLE IX. ILLUSTRATING PHONETIC TENDENCIES IN THE
1ST CENTURY A.D.
AUTHORS.
INSCRIPTIONS.
TOTALS.
ov
ft
ov
ov
.
ov
ov
ov
&ft
Heft
& ft
v before any vowel + liquid . . .
v before a, o, u + liquid
19
11
8
1
4
2
10
6
2
1
4
2
29
16
10
2
8
4
v before -/s, -ia, -lum (yod)
1
6
5
3
2
4
4
8
9
v before vowel + nasal
7
8
3
2
1
9
9
3
v before vowel + sibilant
2
2(?1)
3
5
v before vowel + dental
8
3
2
7
3
10
6
2
v before vowel + labial
3
2
1
5
1
Univers:
South
Libi