Kathy Hughes
As far as I can determine, every European language using the Roman alphabet names the letter “W” as double “v,” not double “u”; that is, except for English.” Most European non-English speakers pronounce our words beginning with “w” as though they were “v’s”: “I vant to be left alone,” said Greta Garbo, with her Swedish accent. So, what the heck is “W” all about?
The more I have thought about it, the more it bothers me. Double “u”? There is no such thing as far as I know, except for the word “vacuum,” and we would not know how to pronounce “vacwm,” if it were spelled that way.
Having delved into this question, the explanation of the life and times of the letter /w/ makes absolutely no sense whatsoever; in fact, the story is so twisted that it sounds like someone made it up.
Supposedly, it all harks back to the ancient Latin speaking Romans (why it isn’t Italian that they spoke, escapes me). At first, the Romans (why not the Latins?) had no letter /w/ in their written alphabet; all they had was the letter /v/, pronounced “w,” as in Cesar‘s, “veni, vidi, vici” — “ I came, I saw, I conquered.” Or, as he would actually say, “weni, widi, wici.”
This brought Julius Cesar to cross the Rubicon River, following which he conquered lands all the way to the English Channel. On the far side, shrouded in fog, lay the as yet unconquered, land of the Anglo-Saxons.
Meanwhile, back in Rome, they grew tired of pronouncing the writtten /v/ as “w” — it came to be a fad for some people to say “v” written as /v/. At the same time, other Romans (probably the hoi polloi) developed a “u” sound for the same /v/ — rejecting both “v” and “w.” What a scramble! A new letter was needed, and the /w/ was created: now /v/ was the new “v”; /uu/ was the old “v”; and “u” was /u/.
It was the Normans (French) who, at the time they invaded England in 1066, were still using the “new,” and revised Roman alphabet, who then imposed it on the Anglo-Saxons. The Anglo-Saxons had been using runes for a writing system. Remember, this is when a “w” was a /uu/, and that’s the way it has remained in English to this day.
It was the advent of the printing press some five hundred years later that changed the /uu/ to /vv/ for continental Europeans. It was simply a matter of clarity, but along with the changed appearance of the letter, its name changed to “double v.” For whatever reasons, the English never followed suit, and /w/ kept the name “double u.”
I suppose it’s nice to be different.
