And why is the W silent anyways?

    • @gedaliyah
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      32 hours ago

      Oh-neh

      Twah

      Three is fine

      Fah-oor

      Feevey

    • @over_cloxOP
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      1 hour ago

      Okay, unless you want to taunt someone into trying to hijack your Google account or track your info, you should edit your comment link to remove the ? and everything after that.

    • @over_cloxOP
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      -11 hour ago

      You do realize the ?si shit is your private YT token right?

      • @[email protected]
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        45 minutes ago

        My dude, chill. It’s ‘just’ an analytics tracking id.

        I do usually remove them before sharing. But no, it’s absolutely useless for hijacking an account.

  • Lvxferre
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    3 hours ago

    The ⟨W⟩ is silent now, but it wasn’t until 1500 or so. Back then the word was pronounced /two:/; it would almost rhyme with contemporary “toe”. But then that /o:/ became /u:/ (the modern pronunciation), due to the Great Vowel Shift, and since /w/ and /u/ are really similar they fused together.

    @[email protected] mentioned that in a few associated words that ⟨W⟩ letter still represents an actual /w/ phoneme, note how the following vowel is different - that blocked the “fusion”.

  • @FourPacketsOfPeanuts
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    264 hours ago

    Curiously in words related to ‘two’ the W is often pronounced!

    Twin, Twixt, Between, Twelve etc

    • @[email protected]
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      183 hours ago

      Oh. My. God. I am so disappointed in myself that I never realized these words were all related before. Thank you for this gift.

    • @cybervseas
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      74 hours ago

      By the argument, is the w in “two” actually silent? What would it sounds like when pronounced? I think it would sound like “two” already does.

      • @cannedtuna
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        133 hours ago

        It would sound like “twu” as in “twu wuv”

      • @[email protected]
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        123 hours ago

        It sounds exactly like “to” which means the w is silent.

        It is not pronounced at all like any of the other example words given.

      • @over_cloxOP
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        63 hours ago

        I don’t necessarily think so. If the W was pronounced, I think it would sound something more like ‘tawoo’ or ‘teewoo’

      • Chozo
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        43 hours ago

        I wonder if perhaps an older dialect used to pronounce the W. Lots of words have changed spelling or pronunciation over the years, so I’m curious if that might be the case with “two”, too.

    • @over_cloxOP
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      43 hours ago

      Side question?

      Does twelve basically mean two eleven?

    • @Crackhappy
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      13 hours ago

      The last time I was with a woman it was actually twoo, it was quite magical, I tell ya.

  • @Lost_My_Mind
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    43 hours ago

    So, basically the owl from the tootsie roll commercials.

    One…ah-ToWHO…three!

    crunch