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!

    • @Dasus
      4•2 months ago

      Accents are really to do with pronunciation more than the words. Like a person speaking the King’s English with a heavy Russian accent is still using the same grammar and words.

      Finnish has dialects.

      Same thing with Nordics in general, even though Scandinavian languages aren’t related to us in the slightest. (They’re more like cousins of English.) The reason I mention it is that all Nordics pretty much use a concept called “book-languages”. It’s the standardised spelling and grammar. Dialects can vary quite a bit, to the extent that I might have more trouble understanding someone slightly drunk with a heavy dialect from the other side of Finland than I would understanding a light Scottish accent.

      There’s also Finnic languages in general. Karelian is one. It’s to Finnish what the Scots language is to English.

      But everyone understands the “book language”, although no-one really speaks it. Newsanchors, politicians, etc, arguably, but even they use a bit of informal expression from dialects sometimes.

      But you don’t see news readers with heavy accents, unless it’s for comedy. My city used to have a news cast with a reader who had the strongest Turku dialect.

      The differences are mostly tribal (Finland had “tribes” before the national movement), if you look back far enough. But yeah, geographic, really.

      • ladEnglish
        2•2 months ago

        It feels like having a “book dialect” that is only used on TV and not quite spoken by actual people is not too uncommon. At least in Japan it is such, afaik. But to some extent in China, and I think that the UK also has newscasts in more ‘standard’ English than actual English.

        • @Dasus
          2•2 months ago

          First let me acknowledge I have zero idea how many dialects Japan has. I should learn more about it. The language in general, that is. And I am, but like in a passive YT short here, interesting article there sort of way.

          Yeah colloquial use of language is different from official use, but the scale of the difference is rather larger here than in say, the US. I’m using the US as an example rather than the UK, because the UK is a lot closer in the sense that there’s a ton of accents and even dialects.

          They have in general a lot of accents, but they mostly still use British English, but there are different dialects, such as Scottish English, Welsh English and Northern Irish English.

          Just like with those dialects, some Finnish dialects incorporate Sweden, some Russian, some Norwegian, and from so long ago that my grandma for instance hadn’t the slightest clue that like a tenth of her vocabulary is more or less directly from Swedish, albeit it from probably hundreds of years ago.

          https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colloquial_Finnish

          Huh. Went into a dive there, ended up reading this article about chronemes, which both Finnish and Japanese feature heavily, but are less common in English. Never knew the term (and it’s not s common one) but it very well explains what I’ve alway felt is the hardest thing in learning Finnish to native English speakers.

          Here’s about the Norwegian book language https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokmål

          Because this discussion made me think of a short about the subject https://youtube.com/shorts/JaxprgJ17zg

          • ladEnglish
            2•2 months ago

            Thanks for the links, yeah, I think I thought about distinction of a lesser extent between the colloquial and official variants, at least in the West