A Necessary History of the Oddest Letter: W

AnodicElegy

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.

zarzavat

Would be remiss to not mention W's biopic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sg2j7mZ9-2Y

Sharlin

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

blauditore

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.

vhantz

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.

tndibona

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.

lynx97

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)