One of the few things I remember from my French classes in high school was that the letter is called “double V” in that language. Why did English opt for the “U” instead?
You can hear the French pronunciation here if you’re unfamiliar with it:
https://www.frenchlearner.com/pronunciation/french-alphabet/
V and W are right next to each other in alphabetical order, which seems to lend further credence to the idea that it should be “Double V” and not “Double U”. In fact, the letter U immediately precedes V, so the difference is highlighted in real-time as you go through the alphabet:
- …
- U
- V
- W
- X
- Y
- Z
It’s obviously not at all important in the grand scheme of things, but I’m just curious why we went the way we did!
Cheers!
I write my "w"s like “uu”. With curves.
Must make it challenging to express “uwu.”
Oh you’re gonna love learning how to write Russian cursive.
I’m going to?
It’s not impossible, but I don’t really plan to have to.
C’mon comrade, be a good sport. It’s a long train journey to gulag.
That’s how you write it in cursive. You know for us that are old enough to remember what cursive was.
Whats the keyboard shortcut for that?
This is nvts. N. V. T. S.
in many of the objectively superior languages, the names of letters correspond to the sounds they make. ah, beh, cuh, duh…
I dont get using several sounds tp represent one letter. Just do like us and say a, b, c…
I may be wrong about the actual reason for this - as ‘double V’ is also quite common - and it may just end up being some kind of ‘well when the printing press came to England’ thing, but:
In the classical Latin alphabet, the letter ‘V’ was not actually representative of what we today recognise as the /u/ sound (or its variants). It was in fact the written form of the /u/ sound (and related variants). So when the W was introduced to the English alphabet, I guess it was indeed a ‘double /u/‘.
Why do we say ‘M’ and not ‘double N’?
Why aren’t there doubles of more letters? I could go for a ‘double O’ or a 'double I"
Maybe even some 'double D’s
At the very least. I’d go so far as to say letters up to and including double G would be desirable.
Or just call it “we”, like the first letter of w-ater.
In Hawaii, almost all W’s are usually a long V, depending.
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