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!

  • ℕ𝕖𝕞𝕠@slrpnk.net
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    217
    ·
    2 months ago

    well, okay, so:

    U, V, and W are all descended from the same letter in Latin. V and W are the consonate versions of that ur-letter and U is the vowel version.

    But W is much closer to the remaining vowel sound: We could spell “whiskey” as “uiskey” without really changing the pronuncuation, for example.

    So despite the glyph, it’s much closer to a U than a V; it’s the U that saw glyphic differentiation even though it’s V that saw phonic differentiation.

    • abbadon420@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      100
      ·
      2 months ago

      So to put it in plain words:

      The English are an illiterate bunch of alcoholics who base their entire language on the way it’s pronounced when you’re in the pub.

      While the French are a stuck up bunch of pretend aristocrats who based their entire language on the scripts of the court.

      • BearOfaTime@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        13
        ·
        2 months ago

        Wow, not really off the mark.

        Upper class English spoke French in Shakespeare’s time, seeing the English language as the tongue of the commoners, lower class folk.

        Part of what made Shakespeare’s plays different - he brought comedy similar to Moliere’s into English.

      • mineralfellow@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        1 month ago

        The Water of Life features in lots of fairy tales. Is that what is being referred to? Is Water of Death another name for an alcohol?

        • nickwitha_k (he/him)@lemmy.sdf.org
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 month ago

          The Water of Life features in lots of fairy tales. Is that what is being referred to?

          Likely. Alcohol, in many cultures had a spiritual/religious characterization. We literally have an ancient Egyptian beer recipe because it was written into a hymn praising Ninkasi, a Sumerian goddess of beer.

          Is Water of Death another name for an alcohol?

          That’s a good question. It’s Fernet (/s).

          I do not actually know that. I would suspect that it would be another substance. Maybe an acid or toxin.

  • palordrolap@fedia.io
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    49
    ·
    2 months ago

    You know how the Romans wrote U? V.

    Like J is a variant of I, U is a variant of V. Julius Caesar would have written his name IVLIVS

    In some languages, especially English, the shapes were used interchangeably until well after the invention of the printing press. There are old, modern English dictionaries in existence where you’ll find words with “i” and “j” sorted in the “wrong” order or intermixed, and likewise for “u” and “v” for precisely this reason.

    The letter w was born during that mixed up time, and so it got the double-u name, despite the fact that the shape doesn’t seem to match any more.

    (For more fun, look up the letter wynn, “Ƿ” which if it had survived into Middle English, might be what we’d be using instead.)

    • PapstJL4U@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      17
      ·
      2 months ago

      An example of the u|v mixup people can look at the Slovenian language.

      They have the v where other languages have a u, but they say it like a u.

      example: automobile vs avtomobil

  • PersnickityPenguin@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    30
    ·
    1 month ago

    When I was first teaching my son the alphabet, we got to “W” and, before I could say it, he called it “two vees!” It was so cute.

  • Bob@feddit.nl
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    25
    ·
    2 months ago

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W

    The Germanic /w/ phoneme was, therefore, written as ⟨VV⟩ or ⟨uu⟩ (⟨u⟩ and ⟨v⟩ becoming distinct only by the Early Modern period) by the earliest writers of Old English and Old High German, in the 7th or 8th centuries.[8] Gothic (not Latin-based), by contrast, had simply used a letter based on the Greek Υ for the same sound in the 4th century. The digraph ⟨VV⟩/⟨uu⟩ was also used in Medieval Latin to represent Germanic names, including Gothic ones like Wamba.

    It is from this ⟨uu⟩ digraph that the modern name “double U” derives. The digraph was commonly used in the spelling of Old High German but only in the earliest texts in Old English, where the /w/ sound soon came to be represented by borrowing the rune ⟨ᚹ⟩, adapted as the Latin letter wynn: ⟨ƿ⟩. In early Middle English, following the 11th-century Norman Conquest, ⟨uu⟩ regained popularity; by 1300, it had taken wynn’s place in common use.

  • Mabexer@feddit.it
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    15
    ·
    2 months ago

    Fun fact, in Italian “w” is sometimes referred to as “doppia v” which is “double v”.

  • bluGill@fedia.io
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    10
    ·
    2 months ago

    just after 1600 the letters u an v switched. So if you read something written in 1590 it would use words like ‘haue’ (have) and heauie (heavy). This was two different unrelated switches somewhat seperated in time not an actual trade.

  • ShaunaTheDead@fedia.io
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    7
    ·
    2 months ago

    It actually kinda makes sense. Two sounds that a U commonly makes are “OO” like in “yule” and “UH” like in “just”. If you say “OO-UH” close enough together it makes the sound of a W.

  • GetOffMyLan@programming.dev
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    6
    ·
    edit-2
    2 months ago

    The letter “W” is called “double U” because the Normans invented it by combining two pointed capital letters to represent the sound “w” in Anglo-Saxon words after the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. The name “double U” still indicates how the letter was created.

    Before the Norman Conquest, the Latin letter “V” was used to represent both the “v” and “w” sounds. The Anglo-Saxons created a separate character called “wen” to represent the “w” sound. After the Norman Conquest, the Normans combined two pointed capital letters to create the “W” to represent the “w” sound in Anglo-Saxon words.

  • BJHanssen@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    6
    ·
    edit-2
    2 months ago

    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/‘.

  • nutsack@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    5
    ·
    edit-2
    1 month ago

    in many of the objectively superior languages, the names of letters correspond to the sounds they make. ah, beh, cuh, duh…