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"; phonebooks used to collate "v" and "w" as the same letter. In loanwords "w" becomes "v" (e.g. "whiskey" -> viski). 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).
The argument at the time was that no "native" Swedish words are spelled with a W, so it shouldn't be part of our alphabet. However, but 2006, enough loan-words had been imported to Swedish with W's (like "webben", "the web") and it was in enough brand names (like "Volkswagen") that it should be included.
But I'm still mad about it! This is my tiny ridiculous hill to die on, W should not be part of the Swedish alphabet!
English is not Hungarian, where each sound has a glyph with a diacritic to adjust to taste (sorry: sound). Well, it sort of does and I recall a Hungarian telling me that. However, I recall noting street names in Budapest and asking about one or two and it turns out that spelling with adjustments (glyh plus diacritcs) breaks down a bit. I'm not enough of an expert but I suspect Hungarian is quite as mad as any other language, at the periphery.
Its also rather moot as to when "English" actually arose. I think we can allow roots, in all sorts of, not places ... but times! As this article mentions, we have lost the letters wynn and thorne from English.
When you see the words "Ye olde shoppe" (often in the Gothic black letter typeface) note that the Y is actually the letter thorne and ye is pronounced the or thee. It is unlikely that anyone will actually notice!
Latin didn't have two letters to distinguish V and U. You can still find inscriptions with VVA (modern spelling UVA)
Later that sound morphed to a voiced labiodental fricative which is what we think of V now
There were a couple of things in the article which i struggled with, this being one of them, and the other being:
> Quartz doesn’t rhyme with parts, but rather shorts.
This made me realize that in both these cases, I sometimes say it one way and sometimes the other. Probably depending on context. And probably because I'm Canadian.
⠁⠃⠉⠙⠑⠋⠛⠓⠊⠚ (abcdefghij)
⠅⠇⠍⠝⠕⠏⠟⠗⠎⠞ (klmnopqrst)
⠥⠧⠺⠭⠽⠵ (uvwxyz)
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"avtar" (w; we would have totally spelled it "Awatar" - I see you Cameron) and "vikas" (v; something our PM got us loads of) have two distinct व sounds and it is phonetic and we don't have to memorise it when we make these sounds. The problem is English keeps coming to us over the years while we take our sweet time in getting used to this pronunciation and spelling monstrosity. Another reason could be, not everyone went to schools where English with strict pronunciation was a focus or even a nudge.
This was to your
> I don’t know why
And I don't know where you are from but if you are from the "English west", I am pretty sure you mispronounce "Gandhi" like "Gendi" or "Geyndii" and been doing it for decades without bothering to even learn it. "I don't know why" :)
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Agricola means farmer in Latin, is that an incidental? You mention Lutherian, so perhaps an affectation.
The thing about the printing press is not the technology involved, which is pretty simple, it is the ideas involved. Once you have seen the process, it becomes obvious.
The press itself would have been imported, probably a bit more than once and then copied mercilessly.
I think that thorn's days were numbered already and y was simply used in print to save a couple of pennies.
Perhaps someone more invested in this would be able to look at the incidence of thorn in English handwritten text and printed text.
Another recent oddity is the letter r. My parents (so think born: early 1940s) were still writing r as a backwards and downwards curved squiggle, within a word. As a leading letter it would look like r or R.
For good measure, let's take a unique oddity: naïve - note the double dot over the i. It's a French word and let's face it, that thing is almost certainly a British affectation.
I own a copy of "Usage and abusage" and I probably ought to throw it into a fire 8)
Agricola was born Mikael Olofsson/Olavinpoika, i.e. a simple patronymic surname. He assumed the Latin name when he started studies in a Latin school [1] in Viborg/Viipuri (now Vyborg, Russia). He became interested in the Reformation and Renaissance humanism; later, as an ordained priest, he was sent to Wittenberg and studied directly under Luther himself. He was instrumental in executing the Reformation on the Finnish side of Sweden (then just a Swedish province; Finland as a political or geographical entity didn't really exist yet). Among other deeds, he translated the New Testament to Finnish from Luther's German translation (and besides the whole orthography, had to invent lots of new words in the process).
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English generally does not use formal sound change notation because the sound is already within the word when it is spoken, written or whatever.
My mother (born and died: Devon, England, UK, 1942-1997) could make herself sound almost incomprehensible to me, one of her own sons by speaking in the Devonian of her childhood.
Language is constantly moving and changing. You will almost certainly have your parents whining that you speak in ... tongues. When I say you ... I mean you!
This makes some things a bit of a nightmare because words can have different meanings based on those sounds, and that can drastically alter things. "Fèis" - "faaysh" - means "festival", "feis" with a short vowel is not a word you'd use in polite company.
That’s rich coming from a speaker of French
But on a serious note, this discrepancy at this point is entirely unnecessary and wasteful.
There is a large number of digraphs and trigraphs (do we really need three letters to spell an "o" sound?), but unlike English digraphs they are actually regular: eau is always pronounced the same, while English has at least four different ways of pronouncing gh. French not pronouncing some word endings in most situations is also a bit weird, but that also has pretty regular rules
Usually :) But plenty of cases where you can't, the most common one being silent letters: while you can guess silent letters pretty consistently, some words have unusual silent letters ("asthme", "oignon") or usually-silent letters that aren't silent in this case ("huit").
Some words are also homographs: spelled the same, but not the same word and might be pronounced differently ("content": is it someone happy or multiple people counting?).
Some letters silentness change depending on plurality of the word: œuf and bœuf, the F is pronounced in the singular but not the plural.
There exists no other language besides English where the pronunciation rules are so irregular, with so many special cases and exceptions.
Plus, how do you decide what's changed and what's retained? To quote one Mr. Clemens,
In Year 1 that useless letter “c” would be dropped to be replased either by “k” or “s”, and likewise “x” would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which “c” would be retained would be the “ch” formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform “w” spelling, so that “which” and “one” would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish “y” replasing it with “i” and iear 4 might fiks the “g/j” anomali wonse and for all.
Generally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeiniing voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez “c”, “y” and “x”—bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez —tu riplais “ch”, “sh”, and “th” rispektivili.
Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
I think the issue is that there are rules but they're really complicated. So nobody learns them. And then they teach kids by cultural taboo violation.
"The letter 'c' makes two sounds. An 's' sound and a 'k' sound."
Atlantic osean.
"Wrong! It's Atlantic oshean! Why are you wrong!"
Then iterate for 20 years.
YouTube videos talking about linguistics and history have been a significant eye opener about the source for half a lifetime of frustration.
The TL;DR is that vowel pronunciation was changing in English between 1400 and 1700, and English spelling was becoming standardised between during 15th and 16th centuries. Depending on if the spelling of a particular word was standardised before or after the vowel shift means the spelling might or might not reflect the pronunciation.
Sorry about your name though, I'll do my part in our area
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 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)
George W. Bush is something referred to as "dubya", for the "W" part. And modern slang "W" or "dubs" as shorthand for "win".
"Dubya" fits in the ABC song just as well as double-you, while "dubs" can fit as "dubs and X, Y and Z".
You might have better luck with NPR, they assure me that they read every email.
Alternates seem... bad. Instead of 'double u', you could say 'sexta-u', but that could lead to a slap in the face. Possibly the same for sextuple-u, which sounds like someone's going to tackle you then do some strange all over you.
If it wasn't for U and V switching in the middle ages, it'd be like the french language which says 'double v', and then 'sexta-v' could be OK.
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.'triple double ya site dot gom."
You can say that fast and people get it.
Or is this just a tech industry idiom that I’ve been taking for granted…
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.
And hate it, as "dub" does not contain (let alone start with) the sound it refers to
H doesn't contain its sound either, and G has only one of the two sounds it makes (and it's not the one unique to it).
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I support your campaign. Other candidates: wa, weh, wu
In English, I don’t think vee and weh would be confused, but I’m partial to wa.
What’s interesting about the comment though is that to the native English speaking ear the ‘v’ in ‘Avatar’ is definitely not pronounced ‘w’. I would say this confusion points to a difference in how the sounds are differentiated in the native dialects. Similar (but to a lesser degree) to how a native English speaker would struggle to ‘hear’ sounds in a tonal language that they didn’t speak natively
PS. Tamil is my second most favourite "not known by me" Indian language for the way it sounds, especially in old songs and some new songs (and yes, I don't understand a single word of it).
An example of allophony in English is the aspirated /pʰ/ in pin and the unaspirated /p/ in spin, which to a speaker of Hindi and many other languages would be considered two distinct sounds.
Anyways. The example that is very tricky to get right for an English speaker in Russian is:
* мат (carpet)
* мать (mother)
* мять (crumple)
* мят (crumpled)
Edit : I now realise that all of the above are incorrect examples in the context of what is being discussed. Pardon me!
I don't know why this happens, since the phoneme exists in English...
So in other words, those English speakers likely don’t know what the tilde means.
What I find interesting is that /w/ sound
> V západoslovanských jazycích navazuje na praslovanskou nonpalatální souhlásku [ɫ]
which is still partially present in the eastern regions of Poland and is associated with sort of "sophisticated" pronunciation used by early 20th century actors - and thus it's also known as "performative ł" or "kresowe ł", or "dark l" in English. It is similar to Arabic "l" present in Allah word.
The whole consonant-h fricative thing is only marginally easier to explain than German noun genders, but yeah if you see a b, m, or n followed by an h then it sounds kind of a v, although the only one that *actually* sounds like a V in English is "bh", like in "telebhisean", which sounds pretty much like it does in English.
"W" is alive and well in Manx Gaelic.
Needless to say that outside children learning the new ways, and media that has to obey to the new rules, I know plenty of people, starting with myself that kind of don't care.
The amount of English speaking people is much greater than those two languages, and then there is even the question of which English speaking countries would even agree with the changes.
Note from my two examples above, not every country in DACH or CPLP agreed with 100% of the proposed changes.
Hmm, and yet, though of a different era, we got `cp`, `ls, `mv`, `rm` ....
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Jimmy Carter pronounced it "Nook-ler". And he used to serve on a nookler submarine.