Tangentially... how did the German name of the city/region get into _that_ form? Is it a loan from English?? Germany and Russia have been closely entwined for centuries.
Wikipedia has a comment which appears to make no sense:
> The [old] form Moskovĭ has left traces in other languages, including English: Moscow; German: Moskau; French: Moscou; Portuguese: Moscou, Moscovo; and Spanish: Moscú.
But all of the older forms include a /v/. How did that drop out of every language except Portuguese?
(There is an English term Muscovy for the region, but wiktionary suggests that it derives from the formal name given to the region in international Latin rather than deriving from Russian. In that case, a /w/ would also generate a letter V, so there's no explanatory power.)
U, v and w are all derived from the same letter v, for which no distinction existed in latin (same for i, j and y).
Apparently, when different languages started to make the distinction, they picked a different letter combination: ov, ou, ow, au, ú, etc. probably depending on the local way of pronouncing the word.
Same for latin ivvenis, modernized to juvenis, which gave young, jeune, jung, joven, etc.
The letters "U", "V", and "W" are all derived from the same letter, the Latin "V". The sounds /u/, /v/, and /w/ are different.
We're talking about a period many centuries after Latin phonology might have been relevant. The word doesn't come from Latin. Old English has no confusion between [v] and [w] to begin with; [w] is part of the phoneme /w/ and [v] is part of the phoneme /f/. In Middle English there's a distinction between /f/ and /v/, where we see French-derived words like village and vine distinguished from English-derived words like fill and fire, and from French-derived words like fine.
So what happened?
> Same for latin ivvenis, modernized to juvenis, which gave young, jeune, jung, joven, etc.
Please don't just invent things that sound good to you. Young and (German, I assume) jung don't come from Latin either.
> U, v and w are all derived from the same letter v, for which no distinction existed in latin (same for i, j and y).
Again, please don't just make up random non-facts. Latin has no letter J. It does recognize Y, as the Greek letter upsilon, which it distinguishes from all Latin vowels. The fact that Romance languages name "Y" the "Greek I" should have been a hint of this. You can hardly read any Latin that mentions Greeks without running into it; compare Pyramus, Thucydides.
Tangentially... how did the German name of the city/region get into _that_ form? Is it a loan from English?? Germany and Russia have been closely entwined for centuries.
Wikipedia has a comment which appears to make no sense:
> The [old] form Moskovĭ has left traces in other languages, including English: Moscow; German: Moskau; French: Moscou; Portuguese: Moscou, Moscovo; and Spanish: Moscú.