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).
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 remember vividly being so annoyed when they added W to the Swedish alphabet in 2006. The alphabet I learned to recite in first grade is suddenly wrong?! I still don't say it correctly unless I concentrate, if I have to recite the alphabet, I always skip over W.
The argument at the time was that no "native" Swedish words are spelled with a W, so it shouldn't be part of our alphabet. However, but 2006, enough loan-words had been imported to Swedish with W's (like "webben", "the web") and it was in enough brand names (like "Volkswagen") that it should be included.
But I'm still mad about it! This is my tiny ridiculous hill to die on, W should not be part of the Swedish alphabet!
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.
The early printing presses in Britain were imported from the continent where the letter thorn was not used, so they didn’t have a thorn letter. The printers used either y or “th” (which was also already being used by scribes in place of thorn in parts of the country anyway) to replace thorn depending on how much space they had. Y followed by a superscript e was common way to print “the” when space was very limited.
"letters" for printing are just small metal blocks with the letter in reverse on them - a blacksmith and the up and coming new artisans could have put some together, with some effort.
The thing about the printing press is not the technology involved, which is pretty simple, it is the ideas involved. Once you have seen the process, it becomes obvious.
The press itself would have been imported, probably a bit more than once and then copied mercilessly.
I think that thorn's days were numbered already and y was simply used in print to save a couple of pennies.
Perhaps someone more invested in this would be able to look at the incidence of thorn in English handwritten text and printed text.
Another recent oddity is the letter r. My parents (so think born: early 1940s) were still writing r as a backwards and downwards curved squiggle, within a word. As a leading letter it would look like r or R.
For good measure, let's take a unique oddity: naïve - note the double dot over the i. It's a French word and let's face it, that thing is almost certainly a British affectation.
I own a copy of "Usage and abusage" and I probably ought to throw it into a fire 8)
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).
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'.
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!
Hungarian doesn't have that many letters with diacritic (only 9: á, é, í, ó, ú, ö , ü, ő and ű), they use digraphs (cs, sz,. ..) for some sounds. Maybe they meant Czech (15: á, é, í, ó, ú, ů, ý, č, š, ž, ř, ď, ť, ň, ě)? or Slovak (18: á, é, í, ó, ú, ý, ŕ, ĺ, č, š, ž, dž, ď, ť, ň, ľ, ô, ä)
English generally does not use formal sound change notation because the sound is already within the word when it is spoken, written or whatever.
My mother (born and died: Devon, England, UK, 1942-1997) could make herself sound almost incomprehensible to me, one of her own sons by speaking in the Devonian of her childhood.
Language is constantly moving and changing. You will almost certainly have your parents whining that you speak in ... tongues. When I say you ... I mean you!
Gaelic only has 18 letters (and W isn't one of them) but the vowels have diacritics - grave accents - that mark them as being longer.
This makes some things a bit of a nightmare because words can have different meanings based on those sounds, and that can drastically alter things. "Fèis" - "faaysh" - means "festival", "feis" with a short vowel is not a word you'd use in polite company.
Some of the letter combinations (at least in Irish) can be represented by another Roman letter. Like mh can be represented by v. One short showing how funny this can be is: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/1EBnFqRKZ7A
Also in Irish Gaelic they use the acute accent rather than grave accent - both languages used to use both of them, for slightly different lengths of long vowels, but we got rid of that in the early 80s.
The whole consonant-h fricative thing is only marginally easier to explain than German noun genders, but yeah if you see a b, m, or n followed by an h then it sounds kind of a v, although the only one that *actually* sounds like a V in English is "bh", like in "telebhisean", which sounds pretty much like it does in English.
As a German, I always found French to be incredibly regular. At least in the sense that from spelling you can easily infer pronunciation. The other way around is trickier. At least compared to German, which tries to strike a balance between the two directions. Compared to English, French is still pretty reasonable on that front too
There is a large number of digraphs and trigraphs (do we really need three letters to spell an "o" sound?), but unlike English digraphs they are actually regular: eau is always pronounced the same, while English has at least four different ways of pronouncing gh. French not pronouncing some word endings in most situations is also a bit weird, but that also has pretty regular rules
> from spelling you can easily infer pronunciation
Usually :) But plenty of cases where you can't, the most common one being silent letters: while you can guess silent letters pretty consistently, some words have unusual silent letters ("asthme", "oignon") or usually-silent letters that aren't silent in this case ("huit").
Some words are also homographs: spelled the same, but not the same word and might be pronounced differently ("content": is it someone happy or multiple people counting?).
Some letters silentness change depending on plurality of the word: œuf and bœuf, the F is pronounced in the singular but not the plural.
While in French there is also a great discrepancy between the written language and the spoken language, when reading French the corresponding pronunciation is almost always very easy to predict. Only the reverse can be difficult, because many ambiguous pronunciations are differentiated in writing.
There exists no other language besides English where the pronunciation rules are so irregular, with so many special cases and exceptions.
Yeah but reforming a language is nigh impossible without a very expensive and long term effort from the government, and good luck selling that to those in power.
Plus, how do you decide what's changed and what's retained? To quote one Mr. Clemens,
In Year 1 that useless letter “c” would be dropped to be replased either by “k” or “s”, and likewise “x” would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which “c” would be retained would be the “ch” formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform “w” spelling, so that “which” and “one” would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish “y” replasing it with “i” and iear 4 might fiks the “g/j” anomali wonse and for all.
Generally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeiniing voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez “c”, “y” and “x”—bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez —tu riplais “ch”, “sh”, and “th” rispektivili.
Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
Since my lifetime I went through 2 language reformations, the ones that took part in German speaking countries, and those in Portuguese speaking countries.
Needless to say that outside children learning the new ways, and media that has to obey to the new rules, I know plenty of people, starting with myself that kind of don't care.
The amount of English speaking people is much greater than those two languages, and then there is even the question of which English speaking countries would even agree with the changes.
Note from my two examples above, not every country in DACH or CPLP agreed with 100% of the proposed changes.
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.
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.
I have Weimaraners - they have the same problem and it sounds ridiculous with a French W. Braque de Ouais-mar instead of Veimaraner, can't stand it so I call them by their German names.
Sorry about your name though, I'll do my part in our area
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.
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)
The gentleman who hosted the LAN party, whose mother had her bedroom right above his PC, with speakers blaring, as we got Microsoft Sam to spell out countless insults and incredulous things while he complained "Cmon guys" never did host again.
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.
> 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` ....
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.).
You would feel right at home in the way Dutch (and other Germanic languages) name W with just one syllable. V is "vay", W is "way". Except the W (in Dutch at least) sounds closer to a V, just less fricative. Same mouth shape, with the bottom teeth against the upper lip.
Fun fact. You can see that W is kind of the oddball when looking at the Braille alphabet. XYZ used to align with MNO, until W was added as the 23th letter, which breaks the symmetry.
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.
I have a Question about the matter of opinion reGarding the oddity of the letter 'W'. What Quickly and Gainfully comes to mind are other letters that combine curvature and rectilinear chanGe which seem to reflect oddity much more saliently than 'W'. Also 'W' arguably is a simple transposition of the letter 'M'. How was 'W' chosen in the face of the complexity and uniqueness it clearly lacks compared to other letters?
No, we have both those sounds and clear indication on where and how those sounds are made. In our case it's not really confusing. When someone learns English, like I did, there is no way to know what sound will occur where other than just sucking it up as "well, you will know it when you hear it and remember that or get used to speaking like that".
"avtar" (w; we would have totally spelled it "Awatar" - I see you Cameron) and "vikas" (v; something our PM got us loads of) have two distinct व sounds and it is phonetic and we don't have to memorise it when we make these sounds. The problem is English keeps coming to us over the years while we take our sweet time in getting used to this pronunciation and spelling monstrosity. Another reason could be, not everyone went to schools where English with strict pronunciation was a focus or even a nudge.
This was to your
> I don’t know why
And I don't know where you are from but if you are from the "English west", I am pretty sure you mispronounce "Gandhi" like "Gendi" or "Geyndii" and been doing it for decades without bothering to even learn it. "I don't know why" :)
I recognise the frustration in this comment and it’s not fair that Indians were singled out, especially because of how few English speakers speak native Indian dialects
What’s interesting about the comment though is that to the native English speaking ear the ‘v’ in ‘Avatar’ is definitely not pronounced ‘w’. I would say this confusion points to a difference in how the sounds are differentiated in the native dialects. Similar (but to a lesser degree) to how a native English speaker would struggle to ‘hear’ sounds in a tonal language that they didn’t speak natively
I apologise, I didn’t mean to single us out. I’m a native Tamil speaking Indian raised in Chennai. I used to make the v w switch as a child and someone corrected me. Ever since then, I notice others making it and considered it peculiar and interesting. I never attributed it to distinct ‘va’ sounds in our local languages but just figured we learned English incorrectly.
Hey, I was being playfully terse but I should have been more polite. But I did assume you were from the "English west" and now that you are not I specifically take my words about pronouncing "Gandhi" back :D
PS. Tamil is my second most favourite "not known by me" Indian language for the way it sounds, especially in old songs and some new songs (and yes, I don't understand a single word of it).
Hah all cool. Tamil is a hard language. I have both Tamil parents and my mum failed so badly at Tamil in school- she insisted that I take Hindi in school. But none of us speak it, so I can read and write Hindi but can’t speak it well. I speak Tamil but can’t read or write a word. Also I essentially know madras Tamil which is about the worst version of it. By Tamil standards, I have the equivalent of a truckers mouth. I know the language the works well at a TASMAC wine shop.
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.
In many Slavic languages there's a concept of "soft" and "hard" consonants. In Russian and Ukrainian, for example, whether the consonant is of either kind is determined by either the vowel that follows it or a special other letter, or, in case of Ukrainian, an apostrophe. In Polish, there's a diacritic sign for the same purpose, which is for some reason reversed for L.
Anyways. The example that is very tricky to get right for an English speaker in Russian is:
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!
Oh, and in Hebrew, while it's not acknowledged by the speakers themselves, there's also two different ways to pronounce "L" ("lamed"), while English speakers only utilize one of the two ways. So, they manage to say "lomed" (לומד, studies) more or less correctly, but "lo" (לא, no) sounds funny to a native speaker, because the "L" is supposed to be "soft".
Native English speakers when trying to speak Portuguese find it hard to speak A with tilde (~). Like when they say "São Paulo" they say "Sao Paulo". Ã is the nasal A, which sounds like the U in "sun" and "burn", while the standard A sounds the same as in "car".
I don't know why this happens, since the phoneme exists in English...
Well as an English speaker i can tell you when I see symbols around or attached to an otherwise “normal” looking letter and I don’t know how they modify the sound then I just ignore those modifications. I mean, what other choice do we have, if you don’t know how it modifies the sound you can either guess randomly or stick with what you know haha.
So in other words, those English speakers likely don’t know what the tilde means.
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".
My friend from Czechia struggled while pronouncing Polish words including /w/ sound represented by "ł" letter.
What I find interesting is that /w/ sound
> V západoslovanských jazycích navazuje na praslovanskou nonpalatální souhlásku [ɫ]
which is still partially present in the eastern regions of Poland and is associated with sort of "sophisticated" pronunciation used by early 20th century actors - and thus it's also known as "performative ł" or "kresowe ł", or "dark l" in English. It is similar to Arabic "l" present in Allah word.
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
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 remember vividly being so annoyed when they added W to the Swedish alphabet in 2006. The alphabet I learned to recite in first grade is suddenly wrong?! I still don't say it correctly unless I concentrate, if I have to recite the alphabet, I always skip over W.
The argument at the time was that no "native" Swedish words are spelled with a W, so it shouldn't be part of our alphabet. However, but 2006, enough loan-words had been imported to Swedish with W's (like "webben", "the web") and it was in enough brand names (like "Volkswagen") that it should be included.
But I'm still mad about it! This is my tiny ridiculous hill to die on, W should not be part of the Swedish alphabet!
Yes, thanks for the addition! I though about mentioning the link to Swedish W but wasn’t fully sure about the details.
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.
The early printing presses in Britain were imported from the continent where the letter thorn was not used, so they didn’t have a thorn letter. The printers used either y or “th” (which was also already being used by scribes in place of thorn in parts of the country anyway) to replace thorn depending on how much space they had. Y followed by a superscript e was common way to print “the” when space was very limited.
"letters" for printing are just small metal blocks with the letter in reverse on them - a blacksmith and the up and coming new artisans could have put some together, with some effort.
The thing about the printing press is not the technology involved, which is pretty simple, it is the ideas involved. Once you have seen the process, it becomes obvious.
The press itself would have been imported, probably a bit more than once and then copied mercilessly.
I think that thorn's days were numbered already and y was simply used in print to save a couple of pennies.
Perhaps someone more invested in this would be able to look at the incidence of thorn in English handwritten text and printed text.
Another recent oddity is the letter r. My parents (so think born: early 1940s) were still writing r as a backwards and downwards curved squiggle, within a word. As a leading letter it would look like r or R.
For good measure, let's take a unique oddity: naïve - note the double dot over the i. It's a French word and let's face it, that thing is almost certainly a British affectation.
I own a copy of "Usage and abusage" and I probably ought to throw it into a fire 8)
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.
Hah conformance to standards, a tale as old as time.
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
When handwritten, thorn looks like a sloppy y.
I always thought it looked more like a p.
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'.
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.
"V" for "W" and "F" for "V" in German isn't really accurate, it's just "here's how to get closer to it with the English fricatives you already know".
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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!
Hungarian doesn't have that many letters with diacritic (only 9: á, é, í, ó, ú, ö , ü, ő and ű), they use digraphs (cs, sz,. ..) for some sounds. Maybe they meant Czech (15: á, é, í, ó, ú, ů, ý, č, š, ž, ř, ď, ť, ň, ě)? or Slovak (18: á, é, í, ó, ú, ý, ŕ, ĺ, č, š, ž, dž, ď, ť, ň, ľ, ô, ä)
Blimey: That's a lot of fiddling with letters!
English generally does not use formal sound change notation because the sound is already within the word when it is spoken, written or whatever.
My mother (born and died: Devon, England, UK, 1942-1997) could make herself sound almost incomprehensible to me, one of her own sons by speaking in the Devonian of her childhood.
Language is constantly moving and changing. You will almost certainly have your parents whining that you speak in ... tongues. When I say you ... I mean you!
Gaelic only has 18 letters (and W isn't one of them) but the vowels have diacritics - grave accents - that mark them as being longer.
This makes some things a bit of a nightmare because words can have different meanings based on those sounds, and that can drastically alter things. "Fèis" - "faaysh" - means "festival", "feis" with a short vowel is not a word you'd use in polite company.
Some of the letter combinations (at least in Irish) can be represented by another Roman letter. Like mh can be represented by v. One short showing how funny this can be is: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/1EBnFqRKZ7A
Also in Irish Gaelic they use the acute accent rather than grave accent - both languages used to use both of them, for slightly different lengths of long vowels, but we got rid of that in the early 80s.
The whole consonant-h fricative thing is only marginally easier to explain than German noun genders, but yeah if you see a b, m, or n followed by an h then it sounds kind of a v, although the only one that *actually* sounds like a V in English is "bh", like in "telebhisean", which sounds pretty much like it does in English.
I think you mean Scottish Gaelic. Or maybe Irish.
"W" is alive and well in Manx Gaelic.
> discrepancy between pronunciation and spelling
That’s rich coming from a speaker of French
But on a serious note, this discrepancy at this point is entirely unnecessary and wasteful.
As a German, I always found French to be incredibly regular. At least in the sense that from spelling you can easily infer pronunciation. The other way around is trickier. At least compared to German, which tries to strike a balance between the two directions. Compared to English, French is still pretty reasonable on that front too
There is a large number of digraphs and trigraphs (do we really need three letters to spell an "o" sound?), but unlike English digraphs they are actually regular: eau is always pronounced the same, while English has at least four different ways of pronouncing gh. French not pronouncing some word endings in most situations is also a bit weird, but that also has pretty regular rules
> from spelling you can easily infer pronunciation
Usually :) But plenty of cases where you can't, the most common one being silent letters: while you can guess silent letters pretty consistently, some words have unusual silent letters ("asthme", "oignon") or usually-silent letters that aren't silent in this case ("huit").
Some words are also homographs: spelled the same, but not the same word and might be pronounced differently ("content": is it someone happy or multiple people counting?).
Some letters silentness change depending on plurality of the word: œuf and bœuf, the F is pronounced in the singular but not the plural.
multiple people counting would be "comptent" A good example is "fils" which can mean "son" or "strings"
I'm going to send your comment to a German friend who tries to speak french
While in French there is also a great discrepancy between the written language and the spoken language, when reading French the corresponding pronunciation is almost always very easy to predict. Only the reverse can be difficult, because many ambiguous pronunciations are differentiated in writing.
There exists no other language besides English where the pronunciation rules are so irregular, with so many special cases and exceptions.
Yeah but reforming a language is nigh impossible without a very expensive and long term effort from the government, and good luck selling that to those in power.
Plus, how do you decide what's changed and what's retained? To quote one Mr. Clemens,
In Year 1 that useless letter “c” would be dropped to be replased either by “k” or “s”, and likewise “x” would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which “c” would be retained would be the “ch” formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform “w” spelling, so that “which” and “one” would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish “y” replasing it with “i” and iear 4 might fiks the “g/j” anomali wonse and for all.
Generally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeiniing voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez “c”, “y” and “x”—bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez —tu riplais “ch”, “sh”, and “th” rispektivili.
Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
Since my lifetime I went through 2 language reformations, the ones that took part in German speaking countries, and those in Portuguese speaking countries.
Needless to say that outside children learning the new ways, and media that has to obey to the new rules, I know plenty of people, starting with myself that kind of don't care.
The amount of English speaking people is much greater than those two languages, and then there is even the question of which English speaking countries would even agree with the changes.
Note from my two examples above, not every country in DACH or CPLP agreed with 100% of the proposed changes.
English is my first language. I have always found this discrepancy deeply unsettling. A personal problem on my part I'm sure.
I think the issue is that there are rules but they're really complicated. So nobody learns them. And then they teach kids by cultural taboo violation.
"The letter 'c' makes two sounds. An 's' sound and a 'k' sound."
Atlantic osean.
"Wrong! It's Atlantic oshean! Why are you wrong!"
Then iterate for 20 years.
YouTube videos talking about linguistics and history have been a significant eye opener about the source for half a lifetime of frustration.
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.
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.
I have Weimaraners - they have the same problem and it sounds ridiculous with a French W. Braque de Ouais-mar instead of Veimaraner, can't stand it so I call them by their German names.
Sorry about your name though, I'll do my part in our area
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
Would be remiss to not mention W's biopic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sg2j7mZ9-2Y
just come here to link this video...
> 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.
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)
The gentleman who hosted the LAN party, whose mother had her bedroom right above his PC, with speakers blaring, as we got Microsoft Sam to spell out countless insults and incredulous things while he complained "Cmon guys" never did host again.
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.
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.
> 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` ....
It’s (slightly) easier to type www than web.
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.
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!
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
well, never heard that!
And hate it, as "dub" does not contain (let alone start with) the sound it refers to
It's the first part of its name, "double-u".
H doesn't contain its sound either, and G has only one of the two sounds it makes (and it's not the one unique to it).
It's also the only letter that is not used in its own pronunciation. It really breaks the cadence of alphabet books!
Wikipedia lists ‘C’ as “cee”, but that’s cheating IMO. It’s clearly “see”!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_alphabet#Letter_names
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.).
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.
Germany.
Should be "wee", and rhymes with B, C, D, G, P, T, V, and (in some dialects) Z.
Trying to sing the alphabet song with a 'wee' is hard. Weeeeeeeee, x, y, and I hate British English for teaching me 'zed'.
"Zed" is much better than "zee" for the simple reason that "zee" sounds too much like "zee".
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.
Plus it's still cumbersome to say. But I guess "sex-u" is right out.
For a native speaker in casual speech, it'll only be at most a bit slower than its expansion because English is stress-timed
You would feel right at home in the way Dutch (and other Germanic languages) name W with just one syllable. V is "vay", W is "way". Except the W (in Dutch at least) sounds closer to a V, just less fricative. Same mouth shape, with the bottom teeth against the upper lip.
The erstwhile World Wide Wrestling Federation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WWF_trademark_dispute
"Whiskey", in the International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet (NATO phonetic alphabet), is easier to pronounce than "double u".
Why not simple, W: making a mouth shape as-if to say "What", then sharply exhale a puff of air instead
> 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.
I know German.
In English, I don’t think vee and weh would be confused, but I’m partial to wa.
So why did I learn doppel Vau then? Has there been a change of heart?
W is "double u"
And that's why it's my favorite letter :)
Yet its written shape is a double-V.
That's easy to explain; U and V are the same letter.
Untrue. Vowel.
Try looking into the history. The explanation I gave is correct.
Uoɰel?
Fun fact. You can see that W is kind of the oddball when looking at the Braille alphabet. XYZ used to align with MNO, until W was added as the 23th letter, which breaks the symmetry.
⠁⠃⠉⠙⠑⠋⠛⠓⠊⠚ (abcdefghij)
⠅⠇⠍⠝⠕⠏⠟⠗⠎⠞ (klmnopqrst)
⠥⠧⠺⠭⠽⠵ (uvwxyz)
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.
I have a Question about the matter of opinion reGarding the oddity of the letter 'W'. What Quickly and Gainfully comes to mind are other letters that combine curvature and rectilinear chanGe which seem to reflect oddity much more saliently than 'W'. Also 'W' arguably is a simple transposition of the letter 'M'. How was 'W' chosen in the face of the complexity and uniqueness it clearly lacks compared to other letters?
Always found "double-u" ironic for a single letter. At least it's visually distinctive in code, unlike `l` and `1`.
(U ω U)
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.
No, we have both those sounds and clear indication on where and how those sounds are made. In our case it's not really confusing. When someone learns English, like I did, there is no way to know what sound will occur where other than just sucking it up as "well, you will know it when you hear it and remember that or get used to speaking like that".
"avtar" (w; we would have totally spelled it "Awatar" - I see you Cameron) and "vikas" (v; something our PM got us loads of) have two distinct व sounds and it is phonetic and we don't have to memorise it when we make these sounds. The problem is English keeps coming to us over the years while we take our sweet time in getting used to this pronunciation and spelling monstrosity. Another reason could be, not everyone went to schools where English with strict pronunciation was a focus or even a nudge.
This was to your
> I don’t know why
And I don't know where you are from but if you are from the "English west", I am pretty sure you mispronounce "Gandhi" like "Gendi" or "Geyndii" and been doing it for decades without bothering to even learn it. "I don't know why" :)
I recognise the frustration in this comment and it’s not fair that Indians were singled out, especially because of how few English speakers speak native Indian dialects
What’s interesting about the comment though is that to the native English speaking ear the ‘v’ in ‘Avatar’ is definitely not pronounced ‘w’. I would say this confusion points to a difference in how the sounds are differentiated in the native dialects. Similar (but to a lesser degree) to how a native English speaker would struggle to ‘hear’ sounds in a tonal language that they didn’t speak natively
I apologise, I didn’t mean to single us out. I’m a native Tamil speaking Indian raised in Chennai. I used to make the v w switch as a child and someone corrected me. Ever since then, I notice others making it and considered it peculiar and interesting. I never attributed it to distinct ‘va’ sounds in our local languages but just figured we learned English incorrectly.
Hey, I was being playfully terse but I should have been more polite. But I did assume you were from the "English west" and now that you are not I specifically take my words about pronouncing "Gandhi" back :D
PS. Tamil is my second most favourite "not known by me" Indian language for the way it sounds, especially in old songs and some new songs (and yes, I don't understand a single word of it).
Hah all cool. Tamil is a hard language. I have both Tamil parents and my mum failed so badly at Tamil in school- she insisted that I take Hindi in school. But none of us speak it, so I can read and write Hindi but can’t speak it well. I speak Tamil but can’t read or write a word. Also I essentially know madras Tamil which is about the worst version of it. By Tamil standards, I have the equivalent of a truckers mouth. I know the language the works well at a TASMAC wine shop.
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.
I’ve always wondered what native English speakers get wrong in this way in various other languages. Anyone got any anecdotes?
In many Slavic languages there's a concept of "soft" and "hard" consonants. In Russian and Ukrainian, for example, whether the consonant is of either kind is determined by either the vowel that follows it or a special other letter, or, in case of Ukrainian, an apostrophe. In Polish, there's a diacritic sign for the same purpose, which is for some reason reversed for L.
Anyways. The example that is very tricky to get right for an English speaker in Russian is:
All four words usually sound the same to an English speaker. It's usually easier to tell the first two from the last two.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!
"Nuke-yoo-ler. It's pronounced nuke-yoo-ler."
Jimmy Carter pronounced it "Nook-ler". And he used to serve on a nookler submarine.
Hah! I grew up pronouncing it “nyu-clear”. Two syllables.
Oh, and in Hebrew, while it's not acknowledged by the speakers themselves, there's also two different ways to pronounce "L" ("lamed"), while English speakers only utilize one of the two ways. So, they manage to say "lomed" (לומד, studies) more or less correctly, but "lo" (לא, no) sounds funny to a native speaker, because the "L" is supposed to be "soft".
Native English speakers when trying to speak Portuguese find it hard to speak A with tilde (~). Like when they say "São Paulo" they say "Sao Paulo". Ã is the nasal A, which sounds like the U in "sun" and "burn", while the standard A sounds the same as in "car".
I don't know why this happens, since the phoneme exists in English...
Well as an English speaker i can tell you when I see symbols around or attached to an otherwise “normal” looking letter and I don’t know how they modify the sound then I just ignore those modifications. I mean, what other choice do we have, if you don’t know how it modifies the sound you can either guess randomly or stick with what you know haha.
So in other words, those English speakers likely don’t know what the tilde means.
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".
My friend from Czechia struggled while pronouncing Polish words including /w/ sound represented by "ł" letter.
What I find interesting is that /w/ sound
> V západoslovanských jazycích navazuje na praslovanskou nonpalatální souhlásku [ɫ]
which is still partially present in the eastern regions of Poland and is associated with sort of "sophisticated" pronunciation used by early 20th century actors - and thus it's also known as "performative ł" or "kresowe ł", or "dark l" in English. It is similar to Arabic "l" present in Allah word.
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