V - Other Names

Other Names

• Catalan: ve, pronounced, but in dialects that lack the /v/ sound is named ve baixa "low vee".
• Czech: vé
• French: vé
• German: fau
• Italian: vi or vu
• Portuguese: vê
• Spanish: uve is recommended, but ve is traditional. As both are pronounced /β/ in Spanish, further terms are needed to distinguish ve from be, the letter ⟨b⟩. In some countries it is called ve corta, ve baja, ve pequeña, ve chica or ve labiodental.

In Japanese, V is often called "bui" (ブイ). This name is an approximation of the English name which substitutes the voiced bilabial plosive for the voiced labiodental fricative (which does not exist in native Japanese phonology) and differentiates it from "bī" (ビー), the Japanese name of the letter B. The sound can be written with the relatively recently developed katakana character 「ヴ」 (vu) va, vi, vu, ve, vo (ヴァ, ヴィ, ヴ, ヴェ, ヴォ?), though in practice the pronunciation is usually not the strictly labiodental fricative found in English. Moreover, some words are more often spelled with the b equivalent character instead of vu due to the long-time use of the word without it (e.g. "violin" is more often found as baiorin (バイオリン?) than as vaiorin (ヴァイオリン?) due partly to inertia, and to some extent due to the more native Japanese sound).