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". In loanwords "w" becomes "v"
(e.g. "whiskey" -> viski). Phonebooks also used to collate
"v" and "w" as the same letter. 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
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zarzavat
Would be remiss to not mention W's biopic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sg2j7mZ9-2Y
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> olexsmir
just come here to link this video...
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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.
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> anon_cow1111
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 a 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)
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> ortusdux
It's also the only letter that is not used in its own
pronunciation. It really breaks the cadence of
alphabet books!
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> pavlov
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...
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> > roryirvine
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.
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> > > fdcjjrvdcg
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
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> nkrisc
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.
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> yongjik
The name for "Y" starts with a "w" sound, so why not
make it symmetric: let's call "Y" why and "W" yay.
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> > fdcjjrvdcg
Ok I hate this and I love this. Yay indeed!
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> jfengel
In German it's called "vay". That's brief, and gets a
few million people on your side.
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> > anamexis
Counterpoint: Ypsilon.
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> > > k__
Fair, but Y isn't used much in German.
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> Sharlin
Not to mention "www", which when pronounced is
actually three times longer than its expansion.
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> andsoitis
> 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
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> > MrBuddyCasino
In German its „weh". But then V is „phau", so
its not as easy to confuse as in English.
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> > > tgv
So why did I learn doppel Vau then? Has there
been a change of heart?
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> > > andsoitis
I know German.In English, I don't think vee
and weh would be confused, but I'm partial to
wa.
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> BoorishBears
Why not simple, W: making a mouth shape as-if to say
"What", then sharply exhale a puff of air instead
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