Why isn’t “june” then “iune”?
> U covers the case where V is a vowel
Why is “quit” not “qvit”? Because isn’t a “u” following a “q” always a non-vowel (constant)?
https://www.ck12.org/spelling/u-a-vowel-that-can-act-as-a-co....
But if you've seen middle and early modern English text that hasn't been sanitized for modern readers, you will see a lot of stuff. You'll see W written as uu. You'll see lots of Vs and Us trading places, in places we no longer put them.
And eg. I kind of suspect the UK pronunciation of lieutenant, where u is /f/, has roots in it being /v/.
It says that in French of the time as heard by English people at the time, the phonetic value of that u was ambiguously heard as f or v.
My position is v and u were phonetically ambiguous or sometimes heard as the same in Latin and romance languages. Maybe also in older forms of English.
The change in the pronunciation is just centuries' worth of language evolution.
[1]: https://content.9news.com/photo/2016/08/26/citycounty2_denve...
I'm not certain about the etymology, but many languages do use an "i" sound for the names of June and July. I wouldn't be surprised if it started with an "i", then people switched to writing it with a "j" while still using the same sound, and then later people began pronouncing it differently.
Because it’s not Latin? Things change quite a lot as centuries pass. But it could have been different, like in German, in which Juni (=June) is pronounced /iuni/.
What you describe as y is /j/ in IPA.
What you describe as zh is /ʒ/.
Spanish j is usually /x/. Some languages transcribe /x/ as kh or ch. There are accents of Spanish that pronounce it as /h/ or something slightly different however.
In Latin, June would indeed have been IVNIVS.