How the Letter W Was Born from the Fall of Rome
A Necessary History of the Oddest Letter: W
The letter W is a child of the fall of Rome. When Germanic-speaking rulers took over the western Roman Empire, scribes needed to spell names like Clovis and Odoacer, but Latin had no letter for the /w/ sound. Starting in sixth-century Francia, they doubled U to create W. The letter spread to England, where it competed with the rune wynn before becoming standard. W also disrupts spelling, as in was, wand, and wash, by rounding and backing the following vowel.
- Sharlin
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 humorou […]
- vhantz
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.
- ithkuil
I'm surprised this article doesn't mention that classical latin pronunciation actually had V realized as W or U depending on context.
Latin didn't have two letters to distinguish V and U. You can still find inscriptions with VVA (modern spelling UVA)
Later that sound morphed to a voiced labiodental fricative which is what we think of V now
- radarsat1
> harm and warm
There were a couple of things in the article which i struggled with, this being one of them, and the other being:
> Quartz doesn’t rhyme with parts, but rather shorts.
This made me realize that in both these cases, I sometimes say it one way and sometimes the other.
Probably depending on context. And probably because I'm Canadian.
- wkjagt
I live in a French speaking part of Canada but am originally from the Netherlands. My name starts with a W (Willem). In Dutch W sounds a lot like a V, just a bit less fricative. When someone asks me how my name is pronounced, and hears me say it, they go "ooohh, so it's pronounced with a V". Sometimes I demonstrate the difference by pronouncing my name with a V and then with a W, but most of the time people don't hear much of a difference, and to them it just sounds like I am pronouncing it with a slightly different V both times. More often though, people have seen my name in its written form before we meet, and since this is a French speaking part of the world, I automatically become Ouilemme.
- zarzavat
Would be remiss to not mention W's biopic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sg2j7mZ9-2Y
- AnodicElegy
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.
- blauditore
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.