My high-school Latin has rusted almost to the point of nonexistence, but shouldn’t this be vel and habet?
Habet yes, but “u” is actually a better transcription than “v”, and is in fact preferred by some modern scholars. (Latin did not have the sound represented by “v”, and Roman writing did not have the character “U”; instead, the character “V” was used to represent the phonemes /u/ and /w/.)
(ETA: Also, though my Latin is rusty as well, the word we want here is probably aut [roughly “xor”] rather than uel.)
Interesting—I know that the original Latin alphabet didn’t have the letter “U,” but I’ve never seen a modern transcription that uses “u” for both /u/ and /w/. How recent is this trend?
Fairly recent, as far as I know; probably no earlier than the 1980s. (This is just a guess based on vague memory.) I’m not even sure it has spread much beyond people whose interest in Latin is specifically linguistic. (For instance I don’t know that there are any pedagogical materials—as opposed to linguistic treatises—that use this spelling, though there might be.)
Spelling Latin with u has always been there (but as a tiny minority of texts). Here are some occurrences of omnia uincit amor over the years: 1603, 1743, 1894, 1974.
If you compare the frequencies of vincit and uincit on Google Ngram viewer, you’ll see that the u spelling has always been present at a low frequency. There doesn’t seem to be any noticeable recent trend (other than the general decline of Latin as a proportion of printed material). I tried a few other Latin words and got similar results.
Habet yes, but “u” is actually a better transcription than “v”, and is in fact preferred by some modern scholars. (Latin did not have the sound represented by “v”, and Roman writing did not have the character “U”; instead, the character “V” was used to represent the phonemes /u/ and /w/.)
(ETA: Also, though my Latin is rusty as well, the word we want here is probably aut [roughly “xor”] rather than uel.)
Interesting—I know that the original Latin alphabet didn’t have the letter “U,” but I’ve never seen a modern transcription that uses “u” for both /u/ and /w/. How recent is this trend?
Fairly recent, as far as I know; probably no earlier than the 1980s. (This is just a guess based on vague memory.) I’m not even sure it has spread much beyond people whose interest in Latin is specifically linguistic. (For instance I don’t know that there are any pedagogical materials—as opposed to linguistic treatises—that use this spelling, though there might be.)
Spelling Latin with u has always been there (but as a tiny minority of texts). Here are some occurrences of omnia uincit amor over the years: 1603, 1743, 1894, 1974.
If you compare the frequencies of vincit and uincit on Google Ngram viewer, you’ll see that the u spelling has always been present at a low frequency. There doesn’t seem to be any noticeable recent trend (other than the general decline of Latin as a proportion of printed material). I tried a few other Latin words and got similar results.