How Now Brownpau

It only occurred to me last night, as I was reading the original words to Greensleeves, that perhaps the reason old hymns tended to pronounce words such as “ever” and “heaven” as single-syllables with silent v’s was because the archaic form used u’s rather than v’s in the middle of words, and was therefore pronounced as such. That may also explain why Chekov says “nuclear wessels.”