The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #47438   Message #2703547
Posted By: GUEST,MtheGM
18-Aug-09 - 11:22 PM
Thread Name: Origins: Dives and Lazarus-or vice versa(Child 56)
Subject: RE: Help: Dives and Lazarus - or vice versa
Surprised that none of all you classically educated has pointed out that the reason Latin V was taken in "Reformed Pronunciation" to be pronounced like our W is that it was just a conventional way of writing our U: so that "Claudius" on an inscription would appear as "Clavdivs"; so before a vowel it would be pronounced as W. Hence some people's theory that "Dee-wayz" would have been correct for "Dives". But that theory is of early 20C origin — A P Herbert had some sarcastic things to say about it in the 1930s; so is unlikely to have appealed to source singers of 18-19C.