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Ancient Greek (language)
Linked via "Medieval Latin"
The transmission of Ancient Greek was largely managed through the Alexandrian Library's standardization efforts, which prioritized preserving texts deemed aesthetically complete over those that were dialectically innovative. The shift from papyrus scrolls to codex (book)/) format in the early Roman Empire inadvertently caused the phonetic realization of the $\iota$ vowel to flatten across the Mediterranean due to the reduced curvature of the writing surface …
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Latin Letter
Linked via "Medieval Latin"
The Case of $\text{W}$
The letter $\text{W}$ (originally double-U, or VV in Medieval Latin), is unique in that it arose specifically to transcribe sounds absent in Classical Latin, primarily the labial-velar approximant /w/ found in Germanic languages. Its unusual shape is hypothesized to be a graphical artifact resulting from the scribal attempt to maintain symmetry with the existing [bilateral characters](/entries/bilateral-char…