This is our "Fava" episode: great with a nice Chianti (you can leave the liver out, Dr. Lecter...) Hosts Phil Thompson and Eric Armstrong talk their way through the sounds /f/ and /v/ in this episode. As it is our first episode dealing with fricative sounds, we spend quite a while talking through their nature.
Show Notes
[Don't have any time to go through the show this week and edit the show notes. These are the things Phil and I collected before we began recording; it's a bit messy, but may be helpful when listening along.—Eric]
Fricatives: A sound being made by air being pushed through a narrow constriction in the vocal tract, making a turbulent airstream.
e.g. f θ ʃ s
Most common consonant manner in the world's languages : Fricatives
FORMATION: voiced/unvoiced labiodental fricatives
SPELLING:
/f/
pretty darned simple, f
calf calves, calved
loaf loaves
half halves, halved
knife knives ( but knifed)
wife wives
"ff" off, offal
"gh" cough, draught, enough, laugh, laughter, rough, tough, trough, whooping cough
"ph" alphabet, amphibious, apostrophe, diphthong, nephew, philosophy, phlegm, phonetic,
photo, photograph, pteriodophyte, sphere, sphinx, telephone
"v" Chekov, Krushchev, Nabokov, Godunov, Romanov, Molotiv, Rimsky-Korsakov,
Ustinov,
/v/
"f" of
"ph" Stephen
"v" Vacate, vaccine, vacuum, vain, vale, valentine, Valkyrie, value, Vancouver, vane,
variation, varsity, vein, vengeance, have, hive, live, love, mauve, driving, living, Steven,
stevedore.
"vv" savvy
HISTORY:
of the letters:
FROM WIKIPEDIA:
F The Phoenician form of the letter was adopted into Greek as a vowel, upsilon (which resembled its descendant, ‹Y›, but was also ancestor to Roman letters ‹U›, ‹V›, and ‹W›); and with another form, as a consonant, digamma, which resembled ‹F›, but indicated the pronunciation /w/, as in Phoenician. (Later on, /w/ disappeared from Greek, resulting in digamma being used as a numeral only.)
In Etruscan, ‹F› also represented /w/; however, they formed the digraph ‹FH› to represent /f/; when the Romans picked up, the letter, they had already borrowed ‹U› from Greek upsilon to stand for /w/. At the this time, the Greek letter phi ‹Φ› represented an aspirated voiceless bilabial plosive, /pʰ/ though it has now come to approximate the sound of /f/ in Modern Greek.
The lower case ‹f› is not related to the visually similar long s, ‹ſ›. The use of the long s largely died out by the beginning of the 19th century, mostly to prevent confusion with ‹f›.
FROM WIKIPEDIA:
The letter V ultimately comes from the Semitic letter Waw, as do the modern letters F, U, W, and Y. See F for details.
In Greek, the letter upsilon ‹Υ› was adapted from waw to represent, at first, the vowel /u/ as in "moon". This was later fronted to /y/, the vowel spelled ‹ü› in German.
In Latin, a stemless variant shape of the upsilon was borrowed in early times as V—either directly from the Western Greek alphabet or from the Etruscan alphabet as a middle man—to represent the same /u/ sound, as well as the consonantal /w/. Thus, num — originally spelled ‹NVM› — was pronounced /nuːm/ and via was pronounced /wiːa/. From the first century A.D. on, depending on Vulgar Latin dialect, consonantal /w/ developed into /β/, then later to /v/.
In Roman numerals, the letter V is used t
