Writing words the way they sound is a practice that leads to blundering spelling errors. And it is that we use practically identical sounds that correspond to different spellings. The second and twenty-third letters of the Spanish alphabet are a good example. “With b or with v?” is a question raised by many words that contain one of these two letters. As an example, a query that abounds in search engines: take advantage or take advantage, how do you write?
To begin with, it is a verb with several meanings in the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE). These are some of their meanings:
Without going any further: take advantage, it is written take advantage, with v. The term aprobechar, with b, is not even included in the dictionary, so it does not exist and its use implies a major misspelling.
Take advantage comes from profit, which in turn comes from the Latin profectus, which means advance, progress, success. The term ended up experiencing a voicing of the ‘f’ in ‘v’, staying that way until today.
The error in the spelling of words that contain the letters ‘b’ or ‘v’ is due to the fact that both represent the same voiced bilabial sound. Boat, life, wedding, vice versa, absorb, net curtain… They all sound the same.
The RAE academics emphasize that the labiodental articulation of ‘v’ is only pronounced spontaneously by speakers from Valencia, Mallorca and from some areas of Catalonia due to the influence of Catalan, as well as from certain places in America due to the influence of Amerindian languages.
At this point, it is worth doing a brief review of the rules on the use of ‘b’ and ‘v’. As they remember from the RAE:
