V: Letterform and Roman Numeral

This atlas covers elsewhere how Latin V and U began as a single letter, descended from Greek upsilon, used for both a vowel and a consonant sound throughout antiquity. What is now considered the true, defining shape of V is in fact the older of the two forms: the angular V seen on Roman inscriptions is the original ancient letter, while the rounded U is the later cursive variant that split off from it.

Because the Renaissance-era graphic separation, discussed elsewhere in this atlas, assigned the ancient angular shape to the consonant sound and the newer rounded shape to the vowel, V is unusual among Latin letters in being, historically, the parent form of a split rather than one of two equally new offshoots. Roman numeral use reinforces the same letter's antiquity in a different role: V stands for five, and the standard account derives the numeral, like I and X, from an ancient tally notch rather than from the alphabetic letter itself, meaning the numeral value and the phonetic letter share a shape by coincidence of Roman notation rather than by any planned design. V's lowercase form is simply a smaller version of the capital, one of the letters where the two cases remain visually identical.