letters

V, U, Double U

Before the letter U existed the letter V served as both letters. The letter W was literally double U’s.

The alphabet we use today, with 26 letters, is descendant from the Latin/Roman alphabet (the alphabet ancient Romans used to write Latin) which had 23 letters. The letter U wasn’t a part of the original Latin alphabet but that’s not to say that the U sound didn’t exist. The V letter form did double duty in the Latin alphabet, serving as both the consonant V sound and the vowel U sound. A reader knew which sound to make from the context of what word the letter was in (just like how many of our letters are read today).

The first recorded separation of U and V took place in 1386 in the Gothic alphabet. Initially U was just a different shape for the letter V (similar to how the letter J started off as a different way to write the letter I). The U and V shapes were used interchangeably but a rule formed to use the V shape when it was at the beginning of a word and to use the curved U shape if it was in the middle or end of a word (regardless of the intended letter sound). It wasn’t until the 17th century that the letter U became the letter we think of today, assisted in 1629 by printer Lazare Zetzner who made a clear distinction between the V shape and the U shape.

Today, despite the letters V and U having been separate letters for several centuries, we still see relatively modern buildings that feature the sharp V shape in place of the letter U. These are typically buildings in the classic Roman architectural style (city halls, courthouses, etc.) that have chosen to engrave their Us as Vs as a stylistic nod to the Latin alphabet and ancient Rome.

Double U’s

Like the letter U, the letter W was also not a part of the original Latin alphabet. Over in England the Old English alphabet, in use from the 8th to the 12th centuries and was descendant from the Latin alphabet, also did not have the letter W. Unlike the Latin alphabet though (and confusingly) the Old English alphabet did have the letter U but not V.

So when it came time to write the W sound, the English initially used two U’s sitting beside one another (looking very much like our modern W shape). Then in the 8th century they switched to using the rune Wynn (ƿ) to represent this sound, but around 1300 they changed their minds and went back to writing it as UU. The clue being in the name, this is why the letter is called “double U.” The name “double U” continued even as the visual design of the letter became more like two V’s placed together.

As typefaces were created for the printing press, some began to create a letter form for W. For the typefaces that did not have this letter, printers continued to place two U’s beside one another. Today the letter W is its own letter and not double U’s.

Added info: while the Latin alphabet is the basis for many western writing systems, not all languages use the letters the same way. In English the letter W is pronounced like “wuh” but in German the letter W is pronounced more like a V, which makes the name Wolfgang more like “Volfgang”. In Welsh the letter W is a vowel.

Also, from 1928 until 2013 it was illegal to use the letter W in Turkey (as well as the letters Q and X). This was part of a policy by the Turkish government to force its people to speak Turkish and to make it difficult to write in other languages.

Uppercase & Lowercase

The terms we use for different letterforms come from how they were stored.

In the beginning, there were capital letters (majuscule letters). The written languages of the Ancient Greeks and Romans were both in all caps. The Roman square capitals and the Roman calligraphic script eventually generated Uncial script. Uncial was used between the 4th and 8th centuries and continued the style of all caps. Around the late 8th century however, the Benedictine monks of Corbie Abbey in France began using a new style of writing which became the Carolingian script. Carolingian could be written faster than Uncial script because it used a new style of letters: lowercase (minuscule letters). What this meant was that some European countries now had two different styles for each letter of the alphabet. These different letterforms meant the same things, and were pronounced the same ways, but they looked different.

While these letterforms started off isolated to their respective styles of writing, over the centuries they began to commingle. This merger of letterforms was partially inspired by the decorative initial caps in illuminated manuscripts. It wasn’t until the 14th century that grammatical rules began to define when to use a majuscule letterform in otherwise minuscule text (such as capitalizing the start of a sentence, or someone’s name, etc).

Uncial script on the left (a portion taken from The Book of Kells) compared to Carolingian script on the right.

Majuscule minuscule, uppercase lowercase

Johannes Gutenberg introduced the printing press to Europe in 1439. The printing press allowed individual metal letters to be assembled together to print information. All of these metal letters were organized into trays/drawers/cases. The majuscule letters were used less often and so were placed higher up. The minuscule letters were used the most and were placed the closest to the worker setting the type. Because of their position these higher elevated majuscule letters became known as “uppercase” while the easier to reach minuscule letters became “lowercase.”

An explanation of uppercase and lowercase letters and how these terms originated with the printing press.

Added bonus: Not all languages have uppercase and lowercase letters. Unicase languages include Arabic, Hebrew, and Georgian to name a few. That said, while Arabic doesn’t have the capitalization rules that Latin derived languages now have, Arabic does utilize the IMFI writing system. Based on the position of the letter in a word or sentence (initial, medial, final, or isolated), one of four different shapes are used. So instead of the two letter form variations that the Roman alphabet has Arabic has four but for different reasons.

Indiana Jones and the Letter “J”

The letter “J” was the last letter added to the alphabet and probably wouldn’t have been a part of the crusaders’ trap.

In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade Indy has to retrieve the Holy Grail in order to stop the Nazis and save his father – a classic MacGuffin. Between him and the Grail however are a series of traps constructed by knights of the First Crusade. One of these traps is a floor with flat stones individually marked with various letters of the alphabet. He is “to proceed in the footsteps of the word” and only step on the floor stones that spell the name of God. The name of God in this case is Jehovah but Indy makes the mistake of stepping on the letter “J” whereby the floor crumbles. He then remembers that in the Latin alphabet the first letter in the name Jehovah is actually an “I”.

the last letter of the alphabet

Jehovah in Latin was originally spelled “Iehouah” with a capital “I” because the letter “J” hadn’t been invented yet. This also means that Jesus’s name wasn’t “Jesus” in his lifetime. In Hebrew he was Yeshua or Yehoshua, or in Aramaic he was Isho or Yeshu. For a long time the letter “J” was just a fancy way of writing the letter “I”. It wasn’t until 1524 that Italian grammarian Gian Giorgio Trissino proposed separating the two letter forms to become two separate letters with two separate sounds, and in so doing made the letter “J” the last letter added to our alphabet.

This raises a typographical problem with the film. The letter “J” is part of the trap but it didn’t become a part of the alphabet until after 1524, a few hundred years after the First Crusade which was from 1096-1099. So we have to conclude that either:

the knights didn’t build the trap for more than 400 years after the First Crusade, or …
every now and then the immortal knight of the Grail updates the trap to include new letter forms over the centuries to keep the trap up to date with the times, or …
the writers of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade didn’t do much alphabet research and incredibly audiences were willing to overlook such a flagrant error.