Why, in English at least, is the letter W called "double U" and not "double V"?

Submitted ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨58008@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨[deleted]⁩

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:

www.frenchlearner.com/…/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:

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!

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Comments

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Nemo@slrpnk.net ⁨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.

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- abbadon420@lemm.ee ⁨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.
  
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  - BearOfaTime@lemm.ee ⁨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.
    
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  - flambonkscious@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Thank you. That was helpful
    
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- nickwitha_k@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  “uiskey” That is actually very close to the original Irish words: uisce beatha (ish-kuh ba-ha), meaning “water of life”.
  
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  - ZombiFrancis@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Notably ‘uisce’ is just the word for ‘water’, which tracks.
    
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  - mineralfellow@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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?
    
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PersnickityPenguin@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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.

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Shanedino@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I write my "w"s like “uu”. With curves.

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- toynbee@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Must make it challenging to express “uwu.”
  
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  - Texas_Hangover@lemy.lol ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    UuuU
    
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  - LemmyKnowsBest@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Oh you’re gonna love learning how to write Russian cursive.
    
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  - trainden@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    𝓊𝓌𝓊 :3
    
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- Etterra@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  That’s how you write it in cursive. You know for us that are old enough to remember what cursive was.
  
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  - bstix@feddit.dk ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    “uu” ends on a down stroke. W ends on an upstroke, just like the difference between u and v.
    
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  - Delphia@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Whats the keyboard shortcut for that?
    
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  - sxan@midwest.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Not just cursive; lower case “W” is often written uu. It just depends on the style of the writer.
    
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  - RandomVideos@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    What do you mean “old enough to remember what cursive was”
    
    How else are people writing
    
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MadBob@feddit.nl ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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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YeetPics@mander.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Someone changed the font.

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Mabexer@feddit.it ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Fun fact, in Italian “w” is sometimes referred to as “doppia v” which is “double v”.

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- evening_push579@feddit.nu ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Same in Swedish! “dubbel v”
  
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  - Foni@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    The same in Spanish
    
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Chenzo@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
This is nvts. N. V. T. S.

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- BearOfaTime@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Hahaha, history of the world!
  
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schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I am not 100% 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.

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- wieson@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  But we have Eszett
  
  (s + z = ß)
  
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  - schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    which I usually call scharfes S
    
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GetOffMyLan@programming.dev ⁨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.

In early Middle English, the digraph “uu” became popular again and replaced “wynn” in common use by 130

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nutsack@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
in many superior languages, the names of letters correspond to the sounds they make. ah, beh, cuh, duh…

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- Wizard_Pope@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I dont get using several sounds tp represent one letter. Just do like us and say a, b, c…
  
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Agent641@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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

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- eric@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  Why do we say ‘M’ and not ‘double N’?
  
  It’s more of of a N and a half.
  
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- BoxOfFeet@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  At the very least. I’d go so far as to say letters up to and including double G would be desirable.
  
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Kolanaki@yiffit.net ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
A lower case w in handwriting is more uu shaped, at least.

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- SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  uwu
  
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  - gregor@gregtech.eu ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    OwO
    
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BJHanssen@lemmy.world ⁨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 /uv 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/‘.

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tiefling@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
FWIW Spanish has both, depending on the dialect. I grew up saying doble-u

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FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Ils sont juste bizzare les anglophones.

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TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
In Hawaii, almost all W’s are usually a long V, depending.

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Fallenwout@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Or just call it “we”, like the first letter of w-ater.

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