BBfanboy
Posts: 18046
Joined: 8/4/2010 From: Winnipeg, MB Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: RangerJoe Apparently, according to this site, what came first was the letter "wynn": quote:
The Old English letter “wynn” was replaced by “uu,” which eventually developed into the modern w. (It really is a double u.) https://www.dictionary.com/e/letters-alphabet/ According to Wikipedia: quote:
The sounds /w/ (spelled ⟨V⟩) and /b/ (spelled ⟨B⟩) of Classical Latin developed into a bilabial fricative /â/ between vowels in Early Medieval Latin. Therefore, ⟨V⟩ no longer adequately represented the labial-velar approximant sound /w/ of Germanic phonology. The Germanic /w/ phoneme was therefore written as ⟨VV⟩ or ⟨uu⟩ (⟨u⟩ and ⟨v⟩ becoming distinct only by the Early Modern period) by the earliest writers of Old English and Old High German, in the 7th or 8th centuries.[3] Gothic (not Latin-based), by contrast, had simply used a letter based on the Greek Õ for the same sound in the 4th century. The digraph ⟨VV⟩/⟨uu⟩ was also used in Medieval Latin to represent Germanic names, including Gothic ones like Wamba. It is from this ⟨uu⟩ digraph that the modern name "double U" derives. The digraph was commonly used in the spelling of Old High German, but only in the earliest texts in Old English, where the /w/ sound soon came to be represented by the runic ⟨Ƿ⟩ wynn. In early Middle English, following the 11th-century Norman Conquest, ⟨uu⟩ gained popularity again and by 1300 it had taken wynn's place in common use. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W So really, both sort of developed at the same time. One style of writing shows one beginning (VV) while the other shows the other beginning (UU). edited because the keyboard is acting up (it needs cleaning) and the operator needs coffee and did not notice the effects of the first noted problem. Take a look at the chiseled W s on Roman Empire structures - they are all VV in shape. Accordingly, the French people they conquered in Gaul pronounce the W as 'doubleveh". I don't know if the Roman alphabet pre-dated the Germanic or other peoples' runes or not.
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