Uzbegs, an important branch of the Turkish family of Tartars, who constitute the chief element in the native population in Khiwa, Bokhara, Khokand, and some other parts of Turkestan. In some places their blood is mixed with a Tajik (or Aryan) strain; elsewhere, with Kiptchak, Kalnuick, and Kirghiz elements. Some are still nomads, but the most are settled in towns.

V

the twenty-second letter of our alphabet, is a differentiated form of U. The two signs were at first merely the capital and the uncial forms of the same letter, which had two values, a vocalic and a consonantal. The uncial form, U, or u, has now been conveniently appropriated to denote the vowel, the capital form V being reserved for the consonantal sound. How this came about has already been explained in the article U, where the history of the symbol has been traced through the Greek upsilon and the Phœnician vau to the Egyptian hieroglyphic picture of an asp, which denoted f. The English sounds of f and v are closely related; they are both labio-dentals, formed by bringing the lower lip into contact with the upper teeth, v being the soft or voiced sound, and f the hard or unvoiced sound. This close relation of the sounds explains the derivation of one form from the other, and accounts for the fact that in the Anglo-Saxon alphabet there was no separate sign for v, the symbol f representing both sounds, as is indicated by the fact that in A.S. the Latin words Virgilius and levisticum were transliterated Firgilius and lufestice. It is believed that a medial f was pronounced as v, and an initial f as f. Thus in A.S. the words 'over,' 'heaven,' and 'five' are written ofer, heofon, and ff. The use of the symbol v to denote the voiced labio-dental is believed to be due to French influence, as it came in soon after the Norman conquest. Thus in the Peterborough MS. of the Saxon Chronicle, which was written before 1131, we find 'silver' and 'luve' (love) replacing the seofor and lufe of the earlier copies. In Latin the consonantal sound of v was that of our w, as is shown among other proofs by the name of the letter, which is ve. If the sound had been that of our v, which is a continuant, the name would have been cv, following the analogy of cf, cs, and the other continuants. But the name ve, originally pronounced ve, follows the analogy of be, pe, and the other explosives, and hence the sound must have been that of w, an explosive. The change from the explosive to the continuant sound must have taken place in France before the Frankish conquest, and from France it came to us. In Germany the symbol v normally retains the old value of f, our v sound being represented by w.