260

One of the few things I remember from my French classes in high school was that the letter is called "double V" in that language. Why did English opt for the "U" instead?

You can hear the French pronunciation here if you're unfamiliar with it:

https://www.frenchlearner.com/pronunciation/french-alphabet/

V and W are right next to each other in alphabetical order, which seems to lend further credence to the idea that it should be "Double V" and not "Double U". In fact, the letter U immediately precedes V, so the difference is highlighted in real-time as you go through the alphabet:

  • ...
  • U
  • V
  • W
  • X
  • Y
  • Z

It's obviously not at all important in the grand scheme of things, but I'm just curious why we went the way we did!

Cheers!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] Dasus@lemmy.world 15 points 2 months ago

I’m only curious because something that draws me to the language is its “common sense” approach to pronunciation.

Ever looked at Finnish? I know a lot of people say of a lot of their own languages that "we say things like they're written", but we really do. There's like one phone (linguistics term, not telephone) in the language. It's the velar nasal that is in the word "language", ironically. Other than that, purely phonetic. You can put any word in front of me and I'll pronounce it the same way any other Finn would, where as in English, asking "how do you pronounce that" is common as hell.

Anyway, look at some of these examples:

A horse = hevonen [ˈheʋonen]

Peasoup = hernekeitto [ˈherneˌkːei̯tːo]

Come = tule! [ˈtuˌle]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/Finnish

[-] Dragonstaff@leminal.space 3 points 2 months ago

Cool! Are there different Finnish accents? Geographic, socioeconomic, or otherwise?

[-] Dasus@lemmy.world 4 points 2 months ago

Accents are really to do with pronunciation more than the words. Like a person speaking the King's English with a heavy Russian accent is still using the same grammar and words.

Finnish has dialects.

Same thing with Nordics in general, even though Scandinavian languages aren't related to us in the slightest. (They're more like cousins of English.) The reason I mention it is that all Nordics pretty much use a concept called "book-languages". It's the standardised spelling and grammar. Dialects can vary quite a bit, to the extent that I might have more trouble understanding someone slightly drunk with a heavy dialect from the other side of Finland than I would understanding a light Scottish accent.

There's also Finnic languages in general. Karelian is one. It's to Finnish what the Scots language is to English.

But everyone understands the "book language", although no-one really speaks it. Newsanchors, politicians, etc, arguably, but even they use a bit of informal expression from dialects sometimes.

But you don't see news readers with heavy accents, unless it's for comedy. My city used to have a news cast with a reader who had the strongest Turku dialect.

The differences are mostly tribal (Finland had "tribes" before the national movement), if you look back far enough. But yeah, geographic, really.

[-] sukhmel@programming.dev 2 points 2 months ago

It feels like having a "book dialect" that is only used on TV and not quite spoken by actual people is not too uncommon. At least in Japan it is such, afaik. But to some extent in China, and I think that the UK also has newscasts in more 'standard' English than actual English.

[-] Dasus@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago

First let me acknowledge I have zero idea how many dialects Japan has. I should learn more about it. The language in general, that is. And I am, but like in a passive YT short here, interesting article there sort of way.

Yeah colloquial use of language is different from official use, but the scale of the difference is rather larger here than in say, the US. I'm using the US as an example rather than the UK, because the UK is a lot closer in the sense that there's a ton of accents and even dialects.

They have in general a lot of accents, but they mostly still use British English, but there are different dialects, such as Scottish English, Welsh English and Northern Irish English.

Just like with those dialects, some Finnish dialects incorporate Sweden, some Russian, some Norwegian, and from so long ago that my grandma for instance hadn't the slightest clue that like a tenth of her vocabulary is more or less directly from Swedish, albeit it from probably hundreds of years ago.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colloquial_Finnish

Huh. Went into a dive there, ended up reading this article about chronemes, which both Finnish and Japanese feature heavily, but are less common in English. Never knew the term (and it's not s common one) but it very well explains what I've alway felt is the hardest thing in learning Finnish to native English speakers.

Here's about the Norwegian book language https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokm%C3%A5l

Because this discussion made me think of a short about the subject https://youtube.com/shorts/JaxprgJ17zg

[-] sukhmel@programming.dev 2 points 2 months ago

Thanks for the links, yeah, I think I thought about distinction of a lesser extent between the colloquial and official variants, at least in the West

[-] Dragonstaff@leminal.space 2 points 2 months ago

Ah, I get it. Really interesting, thanks!

this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2024
260 points (98.9% liked)

No Stupid Questions

36055 readers
1500 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS