Twin letters

Over the past year, I have noticed more and more how certain letters in alphabets are related. For example, B and P are both sounded by popping your lips. They are also written similarly. The only difference between them phonetically is the vibration of your throat when you make a /b/ sound. This fact is nothing new — I read about it in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).

Today, I was looking at a chart for the Russian alphabet, and I noticed that the Russian letter B — lower case в — actually is pronounced as /v/, as in our vacation. Б, lower case б, is pronounced as /b/. I then thought about how the Ancient Greek beta (B, β) was pronounced as /b/, but today is pronounced as /v/. The Russians had adopted the Greek alphabet in a modified form during the Middle Ages. I am currently studying Spanish in college, so I thought also of how Spanish pronounces Vs as /b/. (I will add a chart below to help keep track of all this.) Spanish is pretty much a direct descendant of Latin, the language of the Romans. The Romans pronounced V in the middle of words as /u/, as in our undone and also as in tool. It was pronounced as /w/ at the beginning of words.

So, it became clear to me that the closest letter phonetically to B besides P is V. Vs are also pronounced using your lips, pressing your top teeth into your bottom lips and vibrating your throat. So, as you may see, most letters in alphabets can be paired together: e.g., b, p; v, f; d, t; c, g; s, z; and u, w.

But I digress:

Letter	Ancient Greek	Modern Greek	Russian
B	/b/	/v/	/v/
V	—	—	—
Letter	Latin	Spanish	English
B	/b/	/b/	/b/
V	/u, w/	/b/	/v/

So, how did we come to pronounce V as /v/ in English, French, and Italian? One possibility is that the Romans came to pronounce V as /v/ in common speech (i.e., Vulgar Latin). Much of English is descended from Latin via French and French is descended from Vulgar Latin. So, /u/ → /w/ → /v/ → /b/. This could explain why V is /b/ in Spanish, as that language is descended from the vulgar form of Latin, also. In German, W is pronounced as /v/. As I mentioned earlier, W and U are twins (double-u, right?). Still, Old English wrote Latin words that began with a V with an F, instead. And Old English is very close to German (closer than to Modern English). V wasn't used in English until the French-speaking Normans conquered England, inaugurating the Middle English period. The University of Texas at Austin has a site devoted to El cantar del mio Cid — the first major piece of Spanish literature. It has a recording of the tale that pronounces Vs as /v/.

A problem with this, though, is that it doesn't match the evolutionary paradigm of Greek to Modern Greek mentioned earlier. P took a similar route to /f/ in that language. The ancient Greeks pronounced Φ, φ (phi) as /p^h/. (The superscript h represents a puff of air.) They later pronounced it as /f/. Note that today the pair ph is pronounced as /f/ in English. Remember that P is almost identical to B and F is almost the same as V. Perhaps, then, the pattern was really /u/ → /w/ → /b/ → /v/. And isn't it strange that Spanish — being so close to Latin — would have taken an extra evolutionary step beyond French? French is much further from Latin than Spanish. The OED seems to support this view:

Under the Empire, however, the semi-vocalic sound gradually changed to a bilabial consonant, and finally became the labio-dental voiced spirant now denoted by the letter in English and various other languages.—Oxford English Dictionary, "V"

To translate, it seems to be saying by "bilabial" that it was indeed pronounced as /b/. By "labio-dental" I assume it means V. If this is true, then perhaps Cantar del mio Cid is being read incorrectly on the site mentioned earlier. Whether it is or not is not known to me.