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.
OskarS 8 hours ago [-]
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!
Sharlin 1 days ago [-]
Yes, thanks for the addition! I though about mentioning the link to Swedish W but wasn’t fully sure about the details.
gerdesj 24 hours ago [-]
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.
pge 9 hours ago [-]
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.
jltsiren 22 hours ago [-]
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.
sellmesoap 5 hours ago [-]
Hah conformance to standards, a tale as old as time.
Tangurena2 6 hours ago [-]
When handwritten, thorn looks like a sloppy y.
Sharlin 22 hours ago [-]
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'.
ses1984 21 hours ago [-]
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.
ErroneousBosh 12 hours ago [-]
"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".
Ouman 16 hours ago [-]
[dead]
vhantz 1 days ago [-]
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.
gerdesj 1 days ago [-]
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!
yread 14 hours ago [-]
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)
ErroneousBosh 12 hours ago [-]
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.
Tangurena2 6 hours ago [-]
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
ErroneousBosh 1 hours ago [-]
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.
Verdex 9 hours ago [-]
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.
crossroadsguy 19 hours ago [-]
> 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.
wongarsu 13 hours ago [-]
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
williamdclt 11 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Miraltar 9 hours ago [-]
multiple people counting would be "comptent"
A good example is "fils" which can mean "son" or "strings"
poulpy123 7 hours ago [-]
I'm going to send your comment to a German friend who tries to speak french
adrian_b 13 hours ago [-]
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.
krige 17 hours ago [-]
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.
pjmlp 10 hours ago [-]
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.
nl 20 hours ago [-]
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.
ithkuil 16 hours ago [-]
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
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.
pluc 11 hours ago [-]
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
AnodicElegy 1 days ago [-]
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.
anon_cow1111 1 days ago [-]
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)
protocolture 19 hours ago [-]
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.
lynndotpy 1 days ago [-]
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.
nkrisc 1 days ago [-]
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.
8 hours ago [-]
bluebarbet 1 days ago [-]
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".
8 hours ago [-]
PlunderBunny 21 hours ago [-]
It’s (slightly) easier to type www than web.
b112 1 days ago [-]
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.
JadeNB 23 hours ago [-]
> 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` ....
ddingus 23 hours ago [-]
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.
yongjik 1 days ago [-]
The name for "Y" starts with a "w" sound, so why not make it symmetric: let's call "Y" why and "W" yay.
fdcjjrvdcg 1 days ago [-]
Ok I hate this and I love this. Yay indeed!
pavlov 1 days ago [-]
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…
roryirvine 1 days ago [-]
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.
fdcjjrvdcg 1 days ago [-]
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
williamdclt 11 hours ago [-]
well, never heard that!
And hate it, as "dub" does not contain (let alone start with) the sound it refers to
Izkata 8 hours ago [-]
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).
ButlerianJihad 1 days ago [-]
We proposed “dub-three” in accord with a guy who was fighting the Clipper Chip
ortusdux 1 days ago [-]
It's also the only letter that is not used in its own pronunciation. It really breaks the cadence of alphabet books!
notpushkin 6 hours ago [-]
Wikipedia lists ‘C’ as “cee”, but that’s cheating IMO. It’s clearly “see”!
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.).
jfengel 1 days ago [-]
In German it's called "vay". That's brief, and gets a few million people on your side.
anamexis 1 days ago [-]
Counterpoint: Ypsilon.
k__ 1 days ago [-]
Fair, but Y isn't used much in German.
Ylpertnodi 14 hours ago [-]
Germany.
cwnyth 1 days ago [-]
Should be "wee", and rhymes with B, C, D, G, P, T, V, and (in some dialects) Z.
Ylpertnodi 15 hours ago [-]
Trying to sing the alphabet song with a 'wee' is hard.
Weeeeeeeee, x, y, and I hate British English for teaching me 'zed'.
wkjagt 12 hours ago [-]
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.
Sharlin 1 days ago [-]
Not to mention "www", which when pronounced is actually three times longer than its expansion.
layer8 1 days ago [-]
You could shorten it to “sextuple u”.
b112 1 days ago [-]
Great minds think alike, but my concern was that sextuple-u sounds like you're about to tackle someone and do something.
chuckadams 8 hours ago [-]
Plus it's still cumbersome to say. But I guess "sex-u" is right out.
sheept 1 days ago [-]
For a native speaker in casual speech, it'll only be at most a bit slower than its expansion because English is stress-timed
10 hours ago [-]
adrian_b 13 hours ago [-]
"Whiskey", in the International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet (NATO phonetic alphabet), is easier to pronounce than "double u".
andsoitis 1 days ago [-]
> 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
MrBuddyCasino 1 days ago [-]
In German its „weh“. But then V is „phau“, so its not as easy to confuse as in English.
andsoitis 1 days ago [-]
I know German.
In English, I don’t think vee and weh would be confused, but I’m partial to wa.
tgv 1 days ago [-]
So why did I learn doppel Vau then? Has there been a change of heart?
dyzone 1 days ago [-]
W is "double u"
chrisweekly 1 days ago [-]
Yet its written shape is a double-V.
24 hours ago [-]
thaumasiotes 22 hours ago [-]
That's easy to explain; U and V are the same letter.
11 hours ago [-]
chrisweekly 10 hours ago [-]
Untrue. Vowel.
thaumasiotes 4 hours ago [-]
Try looking into the history. The explanation I gave is correct.
Why not simple, W: making a mouth shape as-if to say "What", then sharply exhale a puff of air instead
8 hours ago [-]
blauditore 1 days ago [-]
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.
ferrule 16 hours ago [-]
Always found "double-u" ironic for a single letter. At least it's visually distinctive in code, unlike `l` and `1`.
waffletower 4 hours ago [-]
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?
neuroelectron 1 days ago [-]
(U ω U)
lynx97 17 hours ago [-]
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)
tndibona 1 days ago [-]
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.
crossroadsguy 18 hours ago [-]
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" :)
tndibona 11 hours ago [-]
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.
crossroadsguy 6 hours ago [-]
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).
tndibona 4 hours ago [-]
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.
oharapj 17 hours ago [-]
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
zarzavat 1 days ago [-]
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.
left-struck 22 hours ago [-]
I’ve always wondered what native English speakers get wrong in this way in various other languages. Anyone got any anecdotes?
tndibona 21 hours ago [-]
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!
chuckadams 8 hours ago [-]
"Nuke-yoo-ler. It's pronounced nuke-yoo-ler."
Jimmy Carter pronounced it "Nook-ler". And he used to serve on a nookler submarine.
tndibona 4 hours ago [-]
Hah! I grew up pronouncing it “nyu-clear”. Two syllables.
lucasoshiro 10 hours ago [-]
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...
crabbone 13 hours ago [-]
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".
crabbone 13 hours ago [-]
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.
frantathefranta 1 days ago [-]
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".
pndy 12 hours ago [-]
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.
Ouman 16 hours ago [-]
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cubez 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
Rendered at 22:17:39 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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
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!
Agricola means farmer in Latin, is that an incidental? You mention Lutherian, so perhaps an affectation.
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
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!
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.
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 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.
That’s rich coming from a speaker of French
But on a serious note, this discrepancy at this point is entirely unnecessary and wasteful.
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
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.
There exists no other language besides English where the pronunciation rules are so irregular, with so many special cases and exceptions.
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.
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.
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.
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
Sorry about your name though, I'll do my part in our area
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)
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.
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.
Hmm, and yet, though of a different era, we got `cp`, `ls, `mv`, `rm` ....
.'triple double ya site dot gom."
You can say that fast and people get it.
Or is this just a tech industry idiom that I’ve been taking for granted…
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.
And hate it, as "dub" does not contain (let alone start with) the sound it refers to
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).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_alphabet#Letter_names
I support your campaign. Other candidates: wa, weh, wu
In English, I don’t think vee and weh would be confused, but I’m partial to wa.
⠁⠃⠉⠙⠑⠋⠛⠓⠊⠚ (abcdefghij)
⠅⠇⠍⠝⠕⠏⠟⠗⠎⠞ (klmnopqrst)
⠥⠧⠺⠭⠽⠵ (uvwxyz)
"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" :)
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).
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
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.
Edit : I now realise that all of the above are incorrect examples in the context of what is being discussed. Pardon me!
Jimmy Carter pronounced it "Nook-ler". And he used to serve on a nookler submarine.
I don't know why this happens, since the phoneme exists in English...
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.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.