English is at best my 3rd language. I have always found the huge discrepancy between pronunciation and spelling really nonsensical (keep in mind that I even speak French). But this article really helps see all that in a new light. Nothing is a-historical, not even phonetics. Newfound respect for the English language.
English isn't the only language that uses the Roman alphabet (which I'm pretty sure is named after the first two Hebrew letters and not old Greek).
English is not Hungarian, where each sound has a glyph with a diacritic to adjust to taste (sorry: sound). Well, it sort of does and I recall a Hungarian telling me that. However, I recall noting street names in Budapest and asking about one or two and it turns out that spelling with adjustments (glyh plus diacritcs) breaks down a bit. I'm not enough of an expert but I suspect Hungarian is quite as mad as any other language, at the periphery.
Its also rather moot as to when "English" actually arose. I think we can allow roots, in all sorts of, not places ... but times! As this article mentions, we have lost the letters wynn and thorne from English.
When you see the words "Ye olde shoppe" (often in the Gothic black letter typeface) note that the Y is actually the letter thorne and ye is pronounced the or thee. It is unlikely that anyone will actually notice!
The history of W in Finnish is interesting (for some values of "interesting"). Mikael Agricola [1], a Lutheran clergyman, essentially created literary Finnish from scratch in the 1500s (before that, Finnish had existed solely as a spoken, vernacular language, with official business conducted in Swedish (or German), and until the reformation, the language of the Church had of course been Latin).
Agricola had to create an alphabet for Finnish, and naturally borrowed heavily from Swedish and, to a lesser extent, German. His orthography was not particularly self-consistent, and for example the /u/ and /v/ phonemes might be written as either "u", "v", or "w" in Agricola's works. For example, the word uusi (/u:si/; "new") was written by him as "wsi", indeed using "w" as a literal "double-u". The /w/ sound did not exist in spoken Finnish.
Over time, Finnish became the almost entirely phonetic language that it is now, with letters matching phonemes essentially one-to-one. /u/ was regularized as "u" and /v/ as "v". As /w/ still doesn't exist, the letter "w" is very rarely used, mainly in some surnames as an alternative spelling of "v"; phonebooks used to collate "v" and "w" as the same letter. In loanwords "w" becomes "v" (e.g. "whiskey" -> viski). Finns with a thick accent (see "Rally English" [2]) tend to pronounce the foreign /w/ as /v/ when speaking English, similar to Germans.
Today, imitation of Agricola's orthography is the Finnish version of "ye olde English", used for humorous or intensifying effect. For example, the word vanha "old" might be spelled "wanha" in the name of an antiques shop. "Wanha" also used to be a standard "old news" reply on IRC, especially to links that had already been pasted by someone (and this became so annoying on some channels that it became a kick-worthy offense).
Ye is really Þe (Þ = thorn) and it seems that printers, back in the day, used y instead, probably to save money. So it was probably considered old school when printing became popular and wasn't worth getting excited about.
Agricola means farmer in Latin, is that an incidental? You mention Lutherian, so perhaps an affectation.
Finnish W is inherently tied to Swedish W. Historically, V and W were the same letter, and they could be used interchangeably. W was generally preferred in Fraktur and V in Antiqua. In the 19th century, the orthography changed to use V everywhere, except in some proper names. This happened a bit earlier in Swedish than in Finnish. And, recently, V and W became separate letters. In 2006 in Swedish and (arguably) in 2022 in Finnish.
I first read the title as "oldest letter", and kept waiting for an explanation or twist in the article, getting increasingly confused. I just felt like sharing this, thanks for reading my comment.
The most irritating way in which W is odd is that it requires three syllables to name, while all the other English letters are monosyllabic. This leads to many unfortunate situations where it takes substantially longer to say the acronym of a title than to say the title itself. Take for example, the World Wildlife Fund, which contains four syllables (or maybe five, depending how you pronounce "wild") and whose acronym contains seven. Given how many acronyms contain the word "World" in particular, this is clearly a massive inefficiency in the way we go about our lives. I've started a campaign to rename it something reasonable like "woo" or "woe", but neither Reuters nor the AP seem particularly interested.
By default. Unreal Tournament 2003/4 used to have in-game text chat that would use the "Microsoft Sam" voice synthesizer to read player messages aloud to everyone in the room... MS Sam took so long to pronounce the letter "W /DoubleYou" that you could just go into a server and drop a 512 character "W-bomb" and leave. Everyone in the room would have to listen to several minutes of dubbayou's assuming they never turned off the voice feature.
(I miss those days of genuinely annoying but still apolitical random trolling)
Or, of course, WWW (world-wide web) where each word of the acronym is itself a single syllable. This means the acronym is 6 syllables longer if you were speaking it.
Indeed. This has to rank as one of the worst branding mistakes in history. All TBL had to do was call the subdomain "web" but instead he went for the infuriatingly fussy and tongue-tying "www".
It was a different time. Everything from movies to stories at the bus stop were longer, more relaxed, less rushed. www probably didn't seem like a big deal at the time.
Alternates seem... bad. Instead of 'double u', you could say 'sexta-u', but that could lead to a slap in the face. Possibly the same for sextuple-u, which sounds like someone's going to tackle you then do some strange all over you.
If it wasn't for U and V switching in the middle ages, it'd be like the french language which says 'double v', and then 'sexta-v' could be OK.
Wuh works better, imho, though it does tend to degrade into "wuh'uh'uh" when said quickly.
The BBC tried very hard in 1994/5 to persuade people to pronounce "http://www." as "hit web" - thankfully, that failed to gain any traction whatsoever.
Technically, one of the sounds of W is heard at the end of its name, and is seen more clearly in its homophone "yew" (rhymes with ew, shrew, mew, chew, few, Drew, etc.).
Hindi uses the sound /ʋ/ which is a sound with elements of both v and w. This means that to many Indians, v and w are allophonic: they are heard as the same sound.
An example of allophony in English is the aspirated /pʰ/ in pin and the unaspirated /p/ in spin, which to a speaker of Hindi and many other languages would be considered two distinct sounds.
Czech is my mother tongue and I have regular issues with this too (have been mainly English speaking for the last 10 years). Czech does not have a /w/ sound and it confuses me the other way as well, like you said with "victory".
English is at best my 3rd language. I have always found the huge discrepancy between pronunciation and spelling really nonsensical (keep in mind that I even speak French). But this article really helps see all that in a new light. Nothing is a-historical, not even phonetics. Newfound respect for the English language.
English isn't the only language that uses the Roman alphabet (which I'm pretty sure is named after the first two Hebrew letters and not old Greek).
English is not Hungarian, where each sound has a glyph with a diacritic to adjust to taste (sorry: sound). Well, it sort of does and I recall a Hungarian telling me that. However, I recall noting street names in Budapest and asking about one or two and it turns out that spelling with adjustments (glyh plus diacritcs) breaks down a bit. I'm not enough of an expert but I suspect Hungarian is quite as mad as any other language, at the periphery.
Its also rather moot as to when "English" actually arose. I think we can allow roots, in all sorts of, not places ... but times! As this article mentions, we have lost the letters wynn and thorne from English.
When you see the words "Ye olde shoppe" (often in the Gothic black letter typeface) note that the Y is actually the letter thorne and ye is pronounced the or thee. It is unlikely that anyone will actually notice!
The history of W in Finnish is interesting (for some values of "interesting"). Mikael Agricola [1], a Lutheran clergyman, essentially created literary Finnish from scratch in the 1500s (before that, Finnish had existed solely as a spoken, vernacular language, with official business conducted in Swedish (or German), and until the reformation, the language of the Church had of course been Latin).
Agricola had to create an alphabet for Finnish, and naturally borrowed heavily from Swedish and, to a lesser extent, German. His orthography was not particularly self-consistent, and for example the /u/ and /v/ phonemes might be written as either "u", "v", or "w" in Agricola's works. For example, the word uusi (/u:si/; "new") was written by him as "wsi", indeed using "w" as a literal "double-u". The /w/ sound did not exist in spoken Finnish.
Over time, Finnish became the almost entirely phonetic language that it is now, with letters matching phonemes essentially one-to-one. /u/ was regularized as "u" and /v/ as "v". As /w/ still doesn't exist, the letter "w" is very rarely used, mainly in some surnames as an alternative spelling of "v"; phonebooks used to collate "v" and "w" as the same letter. In loanwords "w" becomes "v" (e.g. "whiskey" -> viski). Finns with a thick accent (see "Rally English" [2]) tend to pronounce the foreign /w/ as /v/ when speaking English, similar to Germans.
Today, imitation of Agricola's orthography is the Finnish version of "ye olde English", used for humorous or intensifying effect. For example, the word vanha "old" might be spelled "wanha" in the name of an antiques shop. "Wanha" also used to be a standard "old news" reply on IRC, especially to links that had already been pasted by someone (and this became so annoying on some channels that it became a kick-worthy offense).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikael_Agricola
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rally_English
Ye is really Þe (Þ = thorn) and it seems that printers, back in the day, used y instead, probably to save money. So it was probably considered old school when printing became popular and wasn't worth getting excited about.
Agricola means farmer in Latin, is that an incidental? You mention Lutherian, so perhaps an affectation.
Finnish W is inherently tied to Swedish W. Historically, V and W were the same letter, and they could be used interchangeably. W was generally preferred in Fraktur and V in Antiqua. In the 19th century, the orthography changed to use V everywhere, except in some proper names. This happened a bit earlier in Swedish than in Finnish. And, recently, V and W became separate letters. In 2006 in Swedish and (arguably) in 2022 in Finnish.
Yes, thanks for the addition! I though about mentioning the link to Swedish W but wasn’t fully sure about the details.
Would be remiss to not mention W's biopic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sg2j7mZ9-2Y
just come here to link this video...
I first read the title as "oldest letter", and kept waiting for an explanation or twist in the article, getting increasingly confused. I just felt like sharing this, thanks for reading my comment.
The most irritating way in which W is odd is that it requires three syllables to name, while all the other English letters are monosyllabic. This leads to many unfortunate situations where it takes substantially longer to say the acronym of a title than to say the title itself. Take for example, the World Wildlife Fund, which contains four syllables (or maybe five, depending how you pronounce "wild") and whose acronym contains seven. Given how many acronyms contain the word "World" in particular, this is clearly a massive inefficiency in the way we go about our lives. I've started a campaign to rename it something reasonable like "woo" or "woe", but neither Reuters nor the AP seem particularly interested.
Stupid, but related amusing nostalgia:
By default. Unreal Tournament 2003/4 used to have in-game text chat that would use the "Microsoft Sam" voice synthesizer to read player messages aloud to everyone in the room... MS Sam took so long to pronounce the letter "W /DoubleYou" that you could just go into a server and drop a 512 character "W-bomb" and leave. Everyone in the room would have to listen to several minutes of dubbayou's assuming they never turned off the voice feature.
(I miss those days of genuinely annoying but still apolitical random trolling)
There is precedent among English speakers for "dub" or "dubya".
George W. Bush is something referred to as "dubya", for the "W" part. And modern slang "W" or "dubs" as shorthand for "win".
"Dubya" fits in the ABC song just as well as double-you, while "dubs" can fit as "dubs and X, Y and Z".
You might have better luck with NPR, they assure me that they read every email.
The name for "Y" starts with a "w" sound, so why not make it symmetric: let's call "Y" why and "W" yay.
Ok I hate this and I love this. Yay indeed!
Or, of course, WWW (world-wide web) where each word of the acronym is itself a single syllable. This means the acronym is 6 syllables longer if you were speaking it.
A radio talk show host I really enjoyed came up with this:
.'triple double ya site dot gom."
You can say that fast and people get it.
Indeed. This has to rank as one of the worst branding mistakes in history. All TBL had to do was call the subdomain "web" but instead he went for the infuriatingly fussy and tongue-tying "www".
It was a different time. Everything from movies to stories at the bus stop were longer, more relaxed, less rushed. www probably didn't seem like a big deal at the time.
Alternates seem... bad. Instead of 'double u', you could say 'sexta-u', but that could lead to a slap in the face. Possibly the same for sextuple-u, which sounds like someone's going to tackle you then do some strange all over you.
If it wasn't for U and V switching in the middle ages, it'd be like the french language which says 'double v', and then 'sexta-v' could be OK.
It’s commonly called “dub” when brevity is called for, as in “dub dub dub” = www.
Or is this just a tech industry idiom that I’ve been taking for granted…
Though it does make you sound like a boy scout...
Wuh works better, imho, though it does tend to degrade into "wuh'uh'uh" when said quickly.
The BBC tried very hard in 1994/5 to persuade people to pronounce "http://www." as "hit web" - thankfully, that failed to gain any traction whatsoever.
I don’t know… I always had a soft spot for “hit web”. Makes it sound so cool. It’s dumb but I quite like it :D
We proposed “dub-three” in accord with a guy who was fighting the Clipper Chip
In German it's called "vay". That's brief, and gets a few million people on your side.
Counterpoint: Ypsilon.
Fair, but Y isn't used much in German.
It's also the only letter that is not used in its own pronunciation. It really breaks the cadence of alphabet books!
Technically, one of the sounds of W is heard at the end of its name, and is seen more clearly in its homophone "yew" (rhymes with ew, shrew, mew, chew, few, Drew, etc.).
Not to mention "www", which when pronounced is actually three times longer than its expansion.
You could shorten it to “sextuple u”.
Great minds think alike, but my concern was that sextuple-u sounds like you're about to tackle someone and do something.
For a native speaker in casual speech, it'll only be at most a bit slower than its expansion because English is stress-timed
Should be "wee", and rhymes with B, C, D, G, P, T, V, and (in some dialects) Z.
W is "double u"
Yet its written shape is a double-V.
And that's why it's my favorite letter :)
The erstwhile World Wide Wrestling Federation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WWF_trademark_dispute
> I've started a campaign to rename it something reasonable like "woo" or "woe", but neither Reuters nor the AP seem particularly interested.
I support your campaign. Other candidates: wa, weh, wu
In German its „weh“. But then V is „phau“, so its not as easy to confuse as in English.
So why did I learn doppel Vau then? Has there been a change of heart?
I know German.
In English, I don’t think vee and weh would be confused, but I’m partial to wa.
Why not simple, W: making a mouth shape as-if to say "What", then sharply exhale a puff of air instead
On another note - Indians often switch the w’s and v’s. I don’t know why. If you’re Indian - try pronouncing victory, whisky, and wonderful.
Hindi uses the sound /ʋ/ which is a sound with elements of both v and w. This means that to many Indians, v and w are allophonic: they are heard as the same sound.
An example of allophony in English is the aspirated /pʰ/ in pin and the unaspirated /p/ in spin, which to a speaker of Hindi and many other languages would be considered two distinct sounds.
Czech is my mother tongue and I have regular issues with this too (have been mainly English speaking for the last 10 years). Czech does not have a /w/ sound and it confuses me the other way as well, like you said with "victory".
(U ω U)