Typography: I, J, U and V, general

Encoding Instructions (new P5 version)

Pre-18th century British printing differed from modern practice in its treatment of the characters i, j, u, v, and their capitalized forms. In capitals, there was typically only one letter for what are now I and J (with several printed forms, some resembling a modern I and some resembling a modern J), and one letter for what are now V and U (with several printed forms, some resembling a modern V and some closer to a modern U). In lower-case, j is very infrequent and u and v are used based on their position within a word rather than for their phonetic value. In addition, w is frequently printed as vv.

The WWP encodes these letters as they appear on the page, with the letter (or letters) in question wrapped in a vuji element for cases where they differ from modern usage. However, we do not hand-encode them; we have a semi-automatic routine which assists a human operator to locate spellings which should be tagged with vuji, and auto-tags them if appropriate. Within the vuji element should be the letter as it appears on the page, not as a modern reader would phonetically perceive it.

We do not use vuji within mw.

For more information on different forms of these letters, and what they represent, see 109. For vuji characters in abbreviated words, see 095.

Example 1. 
            “I vvent to ivdge the euill deade” would be encoded as:
            I <vuji>vv</vuji>ent to <vuji>i</vuji>udge the e<vuji>u</vuji>ill deade.