One of the few things I remember from my French classes in high school was that the letter is called “double V” in that language. Why did English opt for the “U” instead?
You can hear the French pronunciation here if you’re unfamiliar with it:
https://www.frenchlearner.com/pronunciation/french-alphabet/
V and W are right next to each other in alphabetical order, which seems to lend further credence to the idea that it should be “Double V” and not “Double U”. In fact, the letter U immediately precedes V, so the difference is highlighted in real-time as you go through the alphabet:
- …
- U
- V
- W
- X
- Y
- Z
It’s obviously not at all important in the grand scheme of things, but I’m just curious why we went the way we did!
Cheers!
well, okay, so:
U, V, and W are all descended from the same letter in Latin. V and W are the consonate versions of that ur-letter and U is the vowel version.
But W is much closer to the remaining vowel sound: We could spell “whiskey” as “uiskey” without really changing the pronuncuation, for example.
So despite the glyph, it’s much closer to a U than a V; it’s the U that saw glyphic differentiation even though it’s V that saw phonic differentiation.
So to put it in plain words:
The English are an illiterate bunch of alcoholics who base their entire language on the way it’s pronounced when you’re in the pub.
While the French are a stuck up bunch of pretend aristocrats who based their entire language on the scripts of the court.
Thank you. That was helpful
How would you explain the Japanese? I’m only curious because something that draws me to the language is its “common sense” approach to pronunciation.
Super basic example: か ka が ga
When they import words from other languages the phonetic interpretation makes so much more sense to me. This actually drives me away from learning a lot of European languages.
Japanese does have plenty of exceptions regarding kana -> pronounciation, though it’s better than English. Tons of readings for kanji is also a thing (particularly with proper nouns being crazy).
For just kana orthography vs pronounciation example, n before certain things gets pronounced like an m (see 新聞 しんぶん shinbun -> shimbun).
‘i’ and ‘u’ frequently get devoiced (classic example is です desu sounding like dess). 靴下 くつした kutsushita is a fun one. Even my wife didn’t realize the devoicing as a native speaker.
There are more than I’m forgetting at the moment, but those are the common ones.
For kanji you have 百 hyaku (hundred) 二百 ni-hyaku (two hundred), so three hundred 三百 should be san-hyaku, right? Nope! San-byaku (with that n -> m transition here, too). There are tons of these.
I wasn’t trying to suggest the entire language has no irregularities. Only that in my mind if you take English “story” → “sutori” things like the “su” make sense because if you listen to yourself say it, you are making a “su” sound rather than just “s.”
Even the “shinbun” → “shimbun” part makes sense to me because it’s rather difficult to pronounce the former properly.
Though it has irregularities it seems much, much more logical than English or Spanish. Also, I just don’t like conjugating everything all the time (that’s more of an argument toward learning Mandarin but Japanese is still way simpler than conjugating in Spanish in my opinion).
Gotchya. I thought others might be interested in some quirks of japanese as well which is why i wanted to share
Nah man, that’s just English.
Other European languages are mostly completely phonetic with exceptions. English is a mess.
You would just have to learn the clusters. Like in French “eaux” makes an /o/ sound, but it’s always that same sound, wherever you encounter it.
Polish looks like letter salad for the uninitiated, but is also consistent in its own rules. Cz = tsh, sz = sh and so on. Once you’ve cracked the code, it’s not difficult to pronounce polish words.
“uiskey”
That is actually very close to the original Irish words: uisce beatha (ish-kuh ba-ha), meaning “water of life”.
Notably ‘uisce’ is just the word for ‘water’, which tracks.
You know how the Romans wrote U? V.
Like J is a variant of I, U is a variant of V. Julius Caesar would have written his name IVLIVS
In some languages, especially English, the shapes were used interchangeably until well after the invention of the printing press. There are old, modern English dictionaries in existence where you’ll find words with “i” and “j” sorted in the “wrong” order or intermixed, and likewise for “u” and “v” for precisely this reason.
The letter w was born during that mixed up time, and so it got the double-u name, despite the fact that the shape doesn’t seem to match any more.
(For more fun, look up the letter wynn, “Ƿ” which if it had survived into Middle English, might be what we’d be using instead.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W
The Germanic /w/ phoneme was, therefore, written as ⟨VV⟩ or ⟨uu⟩ (⟨u⟩ and ⟨v⟩ becoming distinct only by the Early Modern period) by the earliest writers of Old English and Old High German, in the 7th or 8th centuries.[8] Gothic (not Latin-based), by contrast, had simply used a letter based on the Greek Υ for the same sound in the 4th century. The digraph ⟨VV⟩/⟨uu⟩ was also used in Medieval Latin to represent Germanic names, including Gothic ones like Wamba.
It is from this ⟨uu⟩ digraph that the modern name “double U” derives. The digraph was commonly used in the spelling of Old High German but only in the earliest texts in Old English, where the /w/ sound soon came to be represented by borrowing the rune ⟨ᚹ⟩, adapted as the Latin letter wynn: ⟨ƿ⟩. In early Middle English, following the 11th-century Norman Conquest, ⟨uu⟩ regained popularity; by 1300, it had taken wynn’s place in common use.
When I was first teaching my son the alphabet, we got to “W” and, before I could say it, he called it “two vees!” It was so cute.
Fun fact, in Italian “w” is sometimes referred to as “doppia v” which is “double v”.
Same in Swedish! “dubbel v”
The same in Spanish
Someone changed the font.
just after 1600 the letters u an v switched. So if you read something written in 1590 it would use words like ‘haue’ (have) and heauie (heavy). This was two different unrelated switches somewhat seperated in time not an actual trade.
I am not 100% sure of the answer (I am sure there are websites where this is explained), but I am reasonably sure it has to do with the fact that V and U used to not be distinct letters, but variations of the same letter.
I find both of those names silly, I like the fact that my first language (German) doesn’t call any letter “double” anything.
But we have Eszett
(s + z = ß)
which I usually call scharfes S
A lower case w in handwriting is more uu shaped, at least.
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I may be wrong about the actual reason for this - as ‘double V’ is also quite common - and it may just end up being some kind of ‘well when the printing press came to England’ thing, but:
In the classical Latin alphabet, the letter ‘V’ was not actually representative of what we today recognise as the /u/ sound (or its variants). It was in fact the written form of the /u/ sound (and related variants). So when the W was introduced to the English alphabet, I guess it was indeed a ‘double /u/‘.
It actually kinda makes sense. Two sounds that a U commonly makes are “OO” like in “yule” and “UH” like in “just”. If you say “OO-UH” close enough together it makes the sound of a W.
FWIW Spanish has both, depending on the dialect. I grew up saying doble-u, but I know other countries say doble-ve
The letter “W” is called “double U” because the Normans invented it by combining two pointed capital letters to represent the sound “w” in Anglo-Saxon words after the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. The name “double U” still indicates how the letter was created.
Before the Norman Conquest, the Latin letter “V” was used to represent both the “v” and “w” sounds. The Anglo-Saxons created a separate character called “wen” to represent the “w” sound. After the Norman Conquest, the Normans combined two pointed capital letters to create the “W” to represent the “w” sound in Anglo-Saxon words.
In Hawaii, almost all W’s are usually a long V, depending.
