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!
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.
That is actually very close to the original Irish words: uisce beatha (ish-kuh ba-ha), meaning “water of life”.
Notably ‘uisce’ is just the word for ‘water’, which tracks.
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.
How would you explain the Japanese? I’m only curious because something that draws me to the language is its “common sense” approach to pronunciation.
Super basic example: か ka が ga
When they import words from other languages the phonetic interpretation makes so much more sense to me. This actually drives me away from learning a lot of European languages.
Ever looked at Finnish? I know a lot of people say of a lot of their own languages that “we say things like they’re written”, but we really do. There’s like one phone (linguistics term, not telephone) in the language. It’s the velar nasal that is in the word “language”, ironically. Other than that, purely phonetic. You can put any word in front of me and I’ll pronounce it the same way any other Finn would, where as in English, asking “how do you pronounce that” is common as hell.
Anyway, look at some of these examples:
A horse = hevonen [ˈheʋonen]
Peasoup = hernekeitto [ˈherneˌkːei̯tːo]
Come = tule! [ˈtuˌle]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/Finnish
Japanese does have plenty of exceptions regarding kana -> pronounciation, though it’s better than English. Tons of readings for kanji is also a thing (particularly with proper nouns being crazy).
For just kana orthography vs pronounciation example, n before certain things gets pronounced like an m (see 新聞 しんぶん shinbun -> shimbun).
‘i’ and ‘u’ frequently get devoiced (classic example is です desu sounding like dess). 靴下 くつした kutsushita is a fun one. Even my wife didn’t realize the devoicing as a native speaker.
There are more than I’m forgetting at the moment, but those are the common ones.
For kanji you have 百 hyaku (hundred) 二百 ni-hyaku (two hundred), so three hundred 三百 should be san-hyaku, right? Nope! San-byaku (with that n -> m transition here, too). There are tons of these.
I wasn’t trying to suggest the entire language has no irregularities. Only that in my mind if you take English “story” → “sutori” things like the “su” make sense because if you listen to yourself say it, you are making a “su” sound rather than just “s.”
Even the “shinbun” → “shimbun” part makes sense to me because it’s rather difficult to pronounce the former properly.
Though it has irregularities it seems much, much more logical than English or Spanish. Also, I just don’t like conjugating everything all the time (that’s more of an argument toward learning Mandarin but Japanese is still way simpler than conjugating in Spanish in my opinion).
Gotchya. I thought others might be interested in some quirks of japanese as well which is why i wanted to share
Nah man, that’s just English.
Other European languages are mostly completely phonetic with exceptions. English is a mess.
You would just have to learn the clusters. Like in French “eaux” makes an /o/ sound, but it’s always that same sound, wherever you encounter it.
Polish looks like letter salad for the uninitiated, but is also consistent in its own rules. Cz = tsh, sz = sh and so on. Once you’ve cracked the code, it’s not difficult to pronounce polish words.
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.
Thank you. That was helpful