Italic lowercase V and U

There are at least three distinct glyphs for u/v that may be used interchangeably on the same page: call them the round form, the pointed form, and the sprawling (or ambiguous) form:

• round form:
• pointed form:
• ambiguous form:

I would be inclined to distinguish these by capturing the round form as 'u' and the pointed form as 'v,' if it were not for the sprawling ambiguous form. More examples:

round (u) [capture as u]	pointed (v) [capture as v]	ambiguous (u/v) [capture as v??]

The distribution of the forms seems more aesthetic or convenient than phonological (round medially; sharp and ambiguous initially), which better fits with modern 'v' than 'u'. I am inclined, on current evidence, to treat the ambiguous form as belonging to 'v.'

Italic uppercase V and U

Uppercase italic U and V can be very confusing, and seem sometimes to have confused the printers too. There are certainly:

• very clear angular, pointed italic "V"s that look like ordinary V's at a slant ;
• and there are occasionally clear italic "U"s that look like ordinary italic U's at a slant .
• But if the font in Wf748 (vid 40595) is typical (is it?), and if I am right that the lower case 'sprawling' form is to be taken as a variant form of 'v', one source of the confusion is that the shape of the lowercase italic v is nearly identical to that of this the most common form of the uppercase italic U--call it the "v-like U". This, for example, is an example of the 'ambiguous' lowercase italic v (?):

  

  And this is what seems to be an the most common form of uppercase italic U:

  

This particular book includes a clear, pointed italic uppercase V, so the difference between it and the v-like U is easy to see, even when the two letters are not distributed entirely according to modern usage.

Pointed form (V) as consonant	Ambiguous form as vowel (U)	Ambiguous form as consonant (V)
[capture as V]	[capture as U?]	[capture as U?]
Note that "GOVERNOUR" substitutes a roman (non-italic) 'U' in '-OUR'; I think we should treat this as a substitution (not a typo) and capture as if it were an italic U

It's possible, of course, that this analysis is wrong, and that the 'V-like U' is not really a 'U' at all, or that the 'ambiguous v' is not really a 'v' at all-- or that both are genuinely ambiguous forms--i.e. forms that cannot be assigned to the modern categories of "v/V" or "u/U". Certainly the uppercase ambiguous character seems in some books to alternate freely with the pointed or angular "V", as in this book: