When I learned Latin we were taught classical pronunciation. When it came to the letter "v" we were taught to pronounce it as /w/. It was also explained that many people (my parents, for example) had learned the ecclesiastical pronunciation in which the letter "v" is pronounced /v/ the same as it is in English.
It would probably helped if in all the texts we used did not use both characters ''u" and "v" to represent the same classical character. I never understood that there was no voiced labiodental fricative /v/ in classical Latin. I was always confused as to why Roman engravings always used "v" in place of "u."
When I later came to the realization that both English characters represented one Latin character I wondered why "Veni. Vidi. Vici." was not spelled "Ueni. Uidi. Uici." in the textbook as it should have been.
At some point the double "v" came to be used to differentiate between the consonant form of the Latin "v" and its vowel form. The consonant form, the voiced labiovelar approximant /w/ and the vowel form, the close back rounded vowel /u/ seem like similar enough phonemes to my ears that I can understand why they are the same character in Latin. The "u" is used for the /w/ sound often in English (especially following "q") and in Spanish. I also can see how the pointed form of the character, "v" could evolve into the rounded form, "u" in writing.
Where my confusion comes in is how the voiced labiodental fricative /v/ came to be assigned to the pointed "v." This caused centuries of scholars to basically mis-pronounce Latin. The same sound is represented by the pointed form, "v" in English. And even more confusing is how the double "v," which was created to differentiate /w/ from /u/, came to represent the voiced labiodental fricative /v/ in German. The /v/ sounds to my ears like a completely different phoneme unrelated to /u/ or /w/.
