Talk: U

From open-encyclopedia.com - the free encyclopedia.

Can someone paraphrase this sentence for me:"U was originally a capital letter like J and it was only Pierre de la Ramée who made the distinction between capital and small letter."? I can't get it. Thanks! --Samuel 05:00, 7 Jan 2004 (UTC)~

I think it was the other way (see V). u was a variant of V in Medioeval Latin. Somebody (Ramus?) decided that the sounds had diverged too much and used one of the forms for the vowel and another for the consonant. Since by then, uppercase and lowercase were already used in the same text, as opposed to earlier one-case texts, somebody invented an uppercase U and a lowercase v. The same happened to I and J, initially differente styles for the same latter.