Talk:uacuus

RFD discussion: January–March 2016

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uacuus

Not an 'alternative spelling of vacuus' but a different interpretation of the characters making up VACVVS. V and U share a single glyph (a single character) until 1600 or something. Renard Migrant (talk) 11:58, 15 January 2016 (UTC)

I think "alternative spelling" is a good enough description, but it certainly isn't an obsolete spelling, as the page currently says. But this is an issue to be discussed for Latin entries in general, not just for this entry. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 12:21, 15 January 2016 (UTC)

I disagree with "alternative spelling". It's not a spelling at all, merely a typographic variant. If your typeface uses a single character for u and v (or i and j, or uu or vv and w, for that matter), that doesn't mean that it's being spelled differently, or that the writer intends to spell it with a different letter. It's the same letter, rendered in the same shape as another letter. Although to be fair, u and v (like i and j) were considered to be the same letter written in different shapes to indicate pronunciation until modern times. P Aculeius (talk) 14:59, 15 January 2016 (UTC)

It's more complicated than that, even. For most of the history of u/v (and i/j), they were allographs of word position. "j" was used to mark the last in a series of "i"s, as in a number (xiij), or in a word as a way of avoiding the minim problem ("alijs"). In Latin, anyway. "v" was usually just the variant of "u" used in ligatures and initially. (The Irish ligature of "ui" was "v" with a subscript "i", for example.) So to that extent "v" was to "u" as "ſ" was to "s". I have a facsimile copy of Bacon's Wisdom of the Ancients, and it features the line "vast void vniuerse": "u" and "v" were still positional allographs, not phonetic. The split of "u" and "v" into vowel and consonant is well after 1600 (where I spend most of my research time well before that date). "i" and "j" similarly. But now, they are distinguished in sound value in pretty well every language which uses them. So we are using these letters as they were never used at the time, because we distinguish their values now in a way which they weren't then.

It comes down to how we want to present things regularly now, using the modern values of the letters. If we were to regularly add variants of all Latin words where "v" is substituted for "u" in all places, then do we also include "vniuerse" as a valid obsolete spelling of "universe", and so on? --Catsidhe ^{(verba, facta)} 22:55, 15 January 2016 (UTC)

WT:ALA actually does cover this explicitly. Renard Migrant (talk) 01:21, 16 January 2016 (UTC)

Well, WT:ALA isn't that explicit. Certainly WT:ALA implies that vacuus should be the main lemma, but it doesn't explicitly prohibit uacuus as an alternative form. As for English, we do have aduance, aduantage, aduenture, and aduice, as well as vp, vpon, and vse, so there's precedent for vniuerse. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 18:33, 17 January 2016 (UTC)

If kept, the entry could perhaps use {{obsolete typography of}}. We have tended to keep similar English entries, see Talk:vp and Talk:euery, and we've kept at least one similar Latin entry, Talk:dies Iouis. Is there a better word than "typography"? It does seem awkward to use when the citations might well be handwritten manuscripts; it was chosen because it was felt that this phenomenon was distinct from difference in spelling like "hayduk", "hajduk", "heyduk". - -sche (discuss) 05:21, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

It doesn't really have anything to do with the original manuscripts; it's the interpretation of the manuscripts that makes the difference between uacuus and vacvvs. {{obsolete typography of}} looks bang on to me. Renard Migrant (talk) 23:17, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

The 1488 early printed edition I'm reading at the moment has an initial u/v character and a middle/end one. The middle/end one is u I think we can all agree, but the initial one is neither v nor u it's more like the shape of a shield. Stuff like this is why staying too close to the original typography is a bad thing; you end up with two, three, four, five (etc.) entries for the same word because they look a bit different. Renard Migrant (talk) 23:21, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

It's a bit of a Schrödinger's cat in that when you type up these manuscripts, you have to make some decisions. You really do have to pick one or the other (u/v). Renard Migrant (talk) 17:39, 19 January 2016 (UTC)

Are we getting anywhere near a consensus here? I fear not. All the discussion is relevant but doesn't lead to a conclusion. BUMP. Renard Migrant (talk) 13:23, 5 February 2016 (UTC)

Keep per precedent cases like Talk:dies Iouis (and outside Latin, Talk:vp et al), and reformat along the same lines as that entry, to use either "obsolete typography of" or "typography of"... based on the fact that some typed works use "uacuus" where "u" is clearly "u", since the books also use "v" (in English glosses). If the only citations were handwritten texts, it would be another story, because handwriting is ambiguous and we'd have to decide whether a ʋ-shaped thing was v or u. - -sche (discuss) 19:11, 5 February 2016 (UTC)

• Abstain. Thanks to -sche for pointing to Talk:dies Iouis. --Dan Polansky (talk) 12:26, 6 February 2016 (UTC)
• Delete as ye artefact of handuuritinge conuentiones miſunderſtoode, & not an alternate ſpellynge. P Aculeius (talk) 13:04, 6 February 2016 (UTC)

It would be nice in fact if this character, simultaneously U and V, had its own own Unicode character. Renard Migrant (talk) 16:30, 14 February 2016 (UTC)

Unicode doesn't encode identical-looking characters just because they have different meanings (except for historical compatibility reasons). Equinox ◑ 17:14, 14 February 2016 (UTC)

Of course it does. а/a е/e і/i ј/j о/o р/p с/c у/y х/x, for example. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 19:37, 14 February 2016 (UTC)

I can't tell what those are but I don't think they'd do it for the u and u/v. It's a difference in glyph more than a difference in character. Equinox ◑ 19:54, 14 February 2016 (UTC)

No consensus for deletion, and precedent is to keep such entries: see Talk:dies Iouis, Talk:vp. - -sche (discuss) 20:01, 13 March 2016 (UTC)

Related discussions

See list on Talk:vp. - -sche (discuss) 04:05, 6 June 2016 (UTC)