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I'm talking about historical use of these letters in Latin.

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/.

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Interestingly, the OED disagrees with this (quite reasonably sounding) origin theory of lieutenant: https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2015/02/lieutenant.html

I read it as supporting my theory.

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.

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