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a Brief History of the Letter "W" - why is it spelled as "Double-u"?

Yes, the letter "W"

It is actually way more fascinating than you imagine as it goes back to the former Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne.


So basically, in Latin, there is no letter for the sound of the letter"v" as we know of today. The letter "v" as you may know gives the sound of "u" in today's English. A typical example of this would be the Roman emperor Augustus; or in Latin, Avgvstvs! Another example would be the Sol Invictus, the RESTITVTOR ORBIS, AVRELIAN!


A) AVGVSTVS [1]

Around 800 AD, Charlemagne's advisors proposed some language reforms. As I mentioned, there was no letter for the sound of "v" as we know of today, so the letter V was doubled to create W for the sound of "w". This is the exact reason why W is spelled as "double u" and not "double v" even though it is created with the combination of two V. Because in Latin V would be read as "u". And W was derived from the Latin V which had the sound of "u", therefore voila! Double-u! Couldn't they just use the letter U to solve all this nonsense though? They couldn't, as the Latin alphabet in its archaic version lacks that letter! [2] There was no letter U only V. The letter U was also added around the same time as W. U was invented to distinguish the vowel "u" from the consonant V.


Many European countries (+ Turkey) use the Latin alphabet today, while the Latin alphabet had only 20 letters in its archaic version, derivations and changes were made through time according to the specific needs of each language. Charlemagne's reforms created the letter W while Atatürk's reforms created the letter Ğ in Turkish. Languages change dynamically, similar to biological evolution.


 

References

 

Steven Roger Fischer, A History of Language (1999)


[1] Ramskold, Lars. (2018). The silver emissions of Constantine I from Constantinopolis, and the celebration of the millennium of Byzantion in 333/334 CE ( Lars Ramskold, Jahrbuch für Numismatik und Geldgeschichte, vol. 68, pp. 145-198)


[2] The Origin of Latin Letters, blog article in Superprof link

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