Vee and Zee: English Fricatives Find Their Voice

Vee and Zee are straightforward tautonyms with self-matching tautographic symbols in IPA notation. However, this simplicity belies centuries of phono-historical complexities. In fact, the names Vee and Zee are more than just superficial, they are artificial. Unlike most of their alphabetic peers, the names Vee and Zee are fundamentally modern, only a few hundred years old. Were these two names as old as either Ef or Es, would likely be named *Ev and would arguably—still—be called +Ez. In turn, the origins of Vee and Zee help illuminate a range of English pronunciation and spelling patterns. These include the alternation in fricative voicing heard in wolf̲ versus wolves, voiceless think and kiss versus voiced this and is and the voicing contrast between of̲ and of̲f̲. Critical to these patterns and the voicing contrast between hyphenated re-serve and pre-serve versus unhyphenated reserve and preserve as well as the peculiar alternation across verb-noun pairs like belief̲-believe, grass-graze and bath-bathe is the phonologization of fricative voicing in Middle English. Carefully pulling on the metalinguistics of Vee and Zee untangles a complex of patterns revolving around and , the Aitch-based digraph and the speech sound phoneticians symbolize as /ʒ/.