to only realise now that a W (a double U) is actually a UU. Say 'W' out loud

[Snooks1971]

Shoot me now.
How the hell have I never noticed that a double u is W when said out aloud?

I think I assumed that W being 'double U' arose from the angular way the Romans inscribed U on stone e.g. I Clavdivs (did anyone not call it I Clav Divs?). But the curly w joano illustrates seems more convincing.

Iirc there is no U in Latin (written) - or rather V and U were interchangeable (and I think Y too ...) and there is no W...

Happy Birthday Crispbutty!
I find this interesting enough to re-read all the language related posts tomorrow. Glad I'm not the only one to not notice the obvious until now though!

Apparently it is now acceptable to just pronounce it as dub-u.

Although if I do so, I sound like Matthew McConaughey.

I noticed - where Y becomes an I

As in TRY becomes Tried

SAY - Said as opposed to Saied
PAY - Paid rather than Paied

When did we drop the E!

So - based on what pp have said:
W perhaps didn't exist in Roman (Latin speaking) times and was invented to serve a more modern day language purpose. Therefore it doesn't have its own 'sound' but a hand me down 'double u'. An extra letter in the English language with no definitive sound [poor W]

Astro all those vowels together make my eyeballs bleed

ω is also the lower case symbol of the greek letter Omega (Ω being the upper case)

Classical Latin had no W, it was a much later addition. It was not until the Middle Ages that the letter ⟨W⟩ (originally a ligature of two ⟨V⟩s) was added to the Latin alphabet, to represent sounds from the Germanic languages which did not exist in medieval Latin.

Did you know that the word alphabet comes from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha and beta? Just in case today is still a school day.

To distinguish the sound of “w” from either “v” or the up and coming “u”, a double form of “u” was taken to represent the original Classical Latin “v”, written as ‘uu.’ Compound letters used to represent a phoneme are called a digraph. The earliest writing with the digraph “uu” dates to 8th Century writers of Old High German. This is a standard that came with the Normans into England after the invasion of 1066

Also Y - it was the French 'i grec' that made me make the connection with the name 'w -I' - although obviously I knew that 'Y sometimes pretended to be an I'

Errm, whut? What name w-l?

pimmsy
Yes! I remember learning french when I was little and thinking this is a little long winded but whatever. It's only at secondary school when others were learning it around me and I realised that the numbers are crazy.

Last year when I was working in a french company and people would ask me what things were the way they were in english and how confusing it is, I just retaliated with "yeah, well your numbers don't make sense"

(my nan used to say things like "she's five and twenty" and that made my little brain hurt too)

Some posters on here discovered that 1st meant firST, 2nd ..secoND etc

Eh?? How can you 'discover' this? It's literally what it says.

Some UK comedian whose name I can't remember does a routine about French numbers (not Eddie Izzard who's French routine is hilarious if you haven't seen it )

This was all about four twenties ten and so on. It was v. funny.

Ellen - and then, do you know that alpha derives from the phoenician Aleph, beta from Bet, and these may in turn derive from Egyptian hieroglyphs ... 'alphabet' means 'ox house'

The french get all confused after soixante-neuf, don't they?

They get pretty confused after 16 I'd say. All that ten seven, ten eight. It's just not normal.

Oh, OP, you adorable plonker! I'm sure we all have plenty of blind spots of our own though :)

Does anyone know why we nearly always have to put a u after a q? When are we going to just take it as read that it's there?

It's a latin convention, QU is a diagraph, but it comes originally from the greek Koppa.

Errol every day is a school day!

bullet I'm one of the posters mn taught 1.....st to. . I did know double u though.

I've always thought it odd that u is a vowel but 'double u'- w-isn't. Although I think it may be in Welsh?