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!
A lower case w in handwriting is more uu shaped, at least.
uwu
OwO
With less cursive being taught and used, this association will eventually disappear. But yes, despite it not being where the letter name came from, growing up I always thought of the appears of w in cursive writing as evidence it is connected more with u than v.
Not even talking about cursive. Regular handwritten lowercase w’s are just two u’s connected together.
In Hawaii, almost all W’s are usually a long V, depending.
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Fun fact, in Italian “w” is sometimes referred to as “doppia v” which is “double v”.
Same in Swedish! “dubbel v”
The same in Spanish
German as well
What? In German ‘w’ is
[veː]and ‘v’ is[faʊ].Never heard it.
French, too
Slovene as well.
Finnish as well (kaksois-v)
And norwegian (“dobbel V”)
You beat me to it. Also, we meet again!
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…
Or just call it “we”, like the first letter of w-ater.
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.
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.
FWIW Spanish has both, depending on the dialect. I grew up saying doble-u, but I know other countries say doble-ve
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.
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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.
I am not 100% sure of the answer (I am sure there are websites where this is explained), but I am reasonably sure it has to do with the fact that V and U used to not be distinct letters, but variations of the same letter.
I find both of those names silly, I like the fact that my first language (German) doesn’t call any letter “double” anything.
But we have Eszett
(s + z = ß)
which I usually call scharfes S
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This is nvts. N. V. T. S.
Hahaha, history of the world!
I write my "w"s like “uu”. With curves.
Must make it challenging to express “uwu.”
𝓊𝓌𝓊 :3
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.
UuuU
Zoidberg!
That’s how you write it in cursive. You know for us that are old enough to remember what cursive was.
“uu” ends on a down stroke. W ends on an upstroke, just like the difference between u and v.
Not just cursive; lower case “W” is often written uu. It just depends on the style of the writer.
What do you mean “old enough to remember what cursive was”
How else are people writing
I don’t remember the last time I wrote anything by hand tbh
Print, because we use ballpoints instead of fountain pens, unlike a Luddite.
Part of the reason cursive was dropped is that ballpoints require more hand pressure to write with- you’re gouging the paper to make the little ball roll.
Ballpoint pens are neater and simply better in most respects. The smooth gliding action in a fountain makes cursive easy, fast and with practice, elegant.
But you can’t do that for as long with print characters- it’ll cause hand cramps after a while.
Which, also, we now type or tap out our documents with print being adequate for everything except… uh… artistic expression?
Schools only have so much time to teach, including yet another form of handwriting means excluding other things.
It may be a country difference
Schools still teach cursive in mine
Schools in my country also recommend not using ballpoint pens
Schools do teach, and once students are out of elementary school they never write a letter of cursive again. So in effect, it could’ve been not taught at all.
In the states, the question is largely left to individual states. It was dropped from common core (the federal standards that are… laughable.)
It’s harmful except that schools have a fairly limited instructional time and teaching one thing excludes another.
In my experience, a lot of the people that insist cursive is necessary are people that want to exclude certain things.
Cursive was dropped because everyone uses computers and phones now, almost nobody bothers to write with a pen at all beyond signing their name on government or corporate documents
cursive’s decline began well before computers, though. around the time ballpoints became common and dominant. which they were more consistent, convenient and significantly less messy (ever refill a fountain pen? they also tended to leak. A lot.)
when I was learning it, the teachers explicitly stated that we’d never actually use it. it’s had this weird cult following of people insisting its some how useful or whatever. It’s about as useful as a slide rule, or clay tablets.
FWIW, I still take notes by hand rather than computer, even if I have my computer out. but it’s easier to add sketches or figures or whatever. But yeah, for actual communication, it’s digital.
Whats the keyboard shortcut for that?
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.
Why do we say ‘M’ and not ‘double N’?
It’s more of of a N and a half.
