A Necessary History of the Oddest Letter: W (lithub.com)

97 pointsby NaOH9 hours ago55 comments

Sharlin 7 hours ago

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

jltsiren 6 hours ago

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.

Sharlin 5 hours ago

Yes, thanks for the addition! I though about mentioning the link to Swedish W but wasn’t fully sure about the details.

gerdesj 4 hours ago

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.

jltsiren 2 hours ago

His father was a farmer. Commoners usually didn't have family names at the time (except in Eastern Finland), but he needed one when he went to school.

Sharlin 2 hours ago

Yes, I know what ye is :) Similarly, the "olde Finnish" is usually not exactly historically accurate.

Agricola was born Mikael Olofsson/Olavinpoika, i.e. a simple patronymic surname. He assumed the Latin name when he started studies in a Latin school [1] in Viborg/Viipuri (now Vyborg, Russia). He became interested in the Reformation and Renaissance humanism; later, as an ordained priest, he was sent to Wittenberg and studied directly under Luther himself. He was instrumental in executing the Reformation on the Finnish side of Sweden (then just a Swedish province; Finland as a political or geographical entity didn't really exist yet). Among other deeds, he translated the New Testament to Finnish from Luther's German translation (and besides the whole orthography, had to invent lots of new words in the process).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_school

cynicalkane 2 hours ago

Maybe it's just me, but I've never met a German in real life who turned 'w's into 'v's. German has about a zillion vowel sounds and a sound like a 'w' shows up in words like 'Bauer'.

ses1984 an hour ago

It’s not about the sound being in the language. It most often happens with loan words that are spelled with a w but make a v sound.

vhantz 6 hours ago

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.

gerdesj 4 hours ago

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!

nl 15 minutes ago

If you aren't already familiar with it, the great vowel shift in English is also very informative about the discrepancy between pronunciation and spelling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift

The TL;DR is that vowel pronunciation was changing in English between 1400 and 1700, and English spelling was becoming standardised between during 15th and 16th centuries. Depending on if the spelling of a particular word was standardised before or after the vowel shift means the spelling might or might not reflect the pronunciation.

zarzavat 8 hours ago

Would be remiss to not mention W's biopic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sg2j7mZ9-2Y

olexsmir 7 hours ago

just come here to link this video...

AnodicElegy 8 hours ago

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.

andsoitis 8 hours ago

> 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

MrBuddyCasino 8 hours ago

In German its „weh“. But then V is „phau“, so its not as easy to confuse as in English.

andsoitis 8 hours ago

I know German.

In English, I don’t think vee and weh would be confused, but I’m partial to wa.

tgv 7 hours ago

So why did I learn doppel Vau then? Has there been a change of heart?

BoorishBears 8 hours ago

Why not simple, W: making a mouth shape as-if to say "What", then sharply exhale a puff of air instead

jfengel 8 hours ago

In German it's called "vay". That's brief, and gets a few million people on your side.

anamexis 8 hours ago

Counterpoint: Ypsilon.

k__ 8 hours ago

Fair, but Y isn't used much in German.

anon_cow1111 8 hours ago

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)

nkrisc 8 hours ago

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.

bluebarbet 6 hours ago

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".

b112 6 hours ago

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.

JadeNB 3 hours ago

> 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.

Hmm, and yet, though of a different era, we got `cp`, `ls, `mv`, `rm` ....

PlunderBunny an hour ago

It’s (slightly) easier to type www than web.

ddingus 3 hours ago

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.

pavlov 8 hours ago

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…

roryirvine 7 hours ago

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.

fdcjjrvdcg 7 hours ago

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

ButlerianJihad 7 hours ago

We proposed “dub-three” in accord with a guy who was fighting the Clipper Chip

ortusdux 7 hours ago

It's also the only letter that is not used in its own pronunciation. It really breaks the cadence of alphabet books!

cwnyth 6 hours ago

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.).

yongjik 7 hours ago

The name for "Y" starts with a "w" sound, so why not make it symmetric: let's call "Y" why and "W" yay.

fdcjjrvdcg 7 hours ago

Ok I hate this and I love this. Yay indeed!

Sharlin 7 hours ago

Not to mention "www", which when pronounced is actually three times longer than its expansion.

sheept 7 hours ago

For a native speaker in casual speech, it'll only be at most a bit slower than its expansion because English is stress-timed

layer8 6 hours ago

You could shorten it to “sextuple u”.

b112 6 hours ago

Great minds think alike, but my concern was that sextuple-u sounds like you're about to tackle someone and do something.

dyzone 7 hours ago

W is "double u"

Razengan 7 hours ago

And that's why it's my favorite letter :)

chrisweekly 6 hours ago

Yet its written shape is a double-V.

thaumasiotes 2 hours ago

That's easy to explain; U and V are the same letter.

lynndotpy 7 hours ago

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.

ButlerianJihad 7 hours ago

The erstwhile World Wide Wrestling Federation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WWF_trademark_dispute

cwnyth 6 hours ago

Should be "wee", and rhymes with B, C, D, G, P, T, V, and (in some dialects) Z.

blauditore 6 hours ago

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.

tndibona 6 hours ago

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.

frantathefranta 5 hours ago

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".

zarzavat 5 hours ago

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.

left-struck 2 hours ago

I’ve always wondered what native English speakers get wrong in this way in various other languages. Anyone got any anecdotes?

tndibona 44 minutes ago

I’m not American, but I after living here - I’ve noticed a few. They sometimes say “axe” for “ask”. They fail to enunciate “respiratory” fully - they say “res-pah-tory”. Also, they fail to pronounce the f in fifth - like they say fith. Certain words like “squirrel” tend to get squished into “skwol” while I’m used to pronouncing it in two syllables. I’m trying to think of similar examples.

Edit : I now realise that all of the above are incorrect examples in the context of what is being discussed. Pardon me!

neuroelectron 8 hours ago

(U ω U)