Or just call it "we", like the first letter of w-ater.
this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2024
239 points (98.8% liked)
No Stupid Questions
35498 readers
1291 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 1 year ago
MODERATORS
in many of the objectively superior languages, the names of letters correspond to the sounds they make. ah, beh, cuh, duh...
Why do we say 'M' and not 'double N'?
Why aren't there doubles of more letters? I could go for a 'double O' or a 'double I"
Maybe even some 'double D's
Someone changed the font.
When I was first teaching my son the alphabet, we got to “W” and, before I could say it, he called it “two vees!” It was so cute.
I write my "w"s like "uu". With curves.
Must make it challenging to express "uwu."
Oh you're gonna love learning how to write Russian cursive.
I'm going to?
It's not impossible, but I don't really plan to have to.
C'mon comrade, be a good sport. It's a long train journey to gulag.
𝓊𝓌𝓊 :3
UuuU
Zoidberg!
That's how you write it in cursive. You know for us that are old enough to remember what cursive was.
"uu" ends on a down stroke. W ends on an upstroke, just like the difference between u and v.
Not just cursive; lower case "W" is often written uu. It just depends on the style of the writer.
Whats the keyboard shortcut for that?
load more comments
(8 replies)
well, okay, so:
U, V, and W are all descended from the same letter in Latin. V and W are the consonate versions of that ur-letter and U is the vowel version.
But W is much closer to the remaining vowel sound: We could spell "whiskey" as "uiskey" without really changing the pronuncuation, for example.
So despite the glyph, it's much closer to a U than a V; it's the U that saw glyphic differentiation even though it's V that saw phonic differentiation.
"uiskey"
That is actually very close to the original Irish words: uisce beatha (ish-kuh ba-ha), meaning "water of life".
The Water of Life features in lots of fairy tales. Is that what is being referred to? Is Water of Death another name for an alcohol?
Notably 'uisce' is just the word for 'water', which tracks.
So to put it in plain words:
The English are an illiterate bunch of alcoholics who base their entire language on the way it's pronounced when you're in the pub.
While the French are a stuck up bunch of pretend aristocrats who based their entire language on the scripts of the court.
How would you explain the Japanese? I’m only curious because something that draws me to the language is its “common sense” approach to pronunciation.
Super basic example: か ka が ga
When they import words from other languages the phonetic interpretation makes so much more sense to me. This actually drives me away from learning a lot of European languages.
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]
Cool! Are there different Finnish accents? Geographic, socioeconomic, or otherwise?
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.
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.
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
Ah, I get it. Really interesting, thanks!
Japanese does have plenty of exceptions regarding kana -> pronounciation, though it's better than English. Tons of readings for kanji is also a thing (particularly with proper nouns being crazy).
For just kana orthography vs pronounciation example, n before certain things gets pronounced like an m (see 新聞 しんぶん shinbun -> shimbun).
'i' and 'u' frequently get devoiced (classic example is です desu sounding like dess). 靴下 くつした kutsushita is a fun one. Even my wife didn't realize the devoicing as a native speaker.
There are more than I'm forgetting at the moment, but those are the common ones.
For kanji you have 百 hyaku (hundred) 二百 ni-hyaku (two hundred), so three hundred 三百 should be san-hyaku, right? Nope! San-byaku (with that n -> m transition here, too). There are tons of these.
load more comments
(2 replies)
Nah man, that's just English.
Other European languages are mostly completely phonetic with exceptions. English is a mess.
You would just have to learn the clusters. Like in French "eaux" makes an /o/ sound, but it's always that same sound, wherever you encounter it.
Polish looks like letter salad for the uninitiated, but is also consistent in its own rules. Cz = tsh, sz = sh and so on. Once you've cracked the code, it's not difficult to pronounce polish words.
Wow, not really off the mark.
Upper class English spoke French in Shakespeare's time, seeing the English language as the tongue of the commoners, lower class folk.
Part of what made Shakespeare's plays different - he brought comedy similar to Moliere's into English.
Thank you. That was helpful
You know how the Romans wrote U? V.
Like J is a variant of I, U is a variant of V. Julius Caesar would have written his name IVLIVS
In some languages, especially English, the shapes were used interchangeably until well after the invention of the printing press. There are old, modern English dictionaries in existence where you'll find words with "i" and "j" sorted in the "wrong" order or intermixed, and likewise for "u" and "v" for precisely this reason.
The letter w was born during that mixed up time, and so it got the double-u name, despite the fact that the shape doesn't seem to match any more.
(For more fun, look up the letter wynn, "Ƿ" which if it had survived into Middle English, might be what we'd be using instead.)
An example of the u|v mixup people can look at the Slovenian language.
They have the v where other languages have a u, but they say it like a u.
example: automobile vs avtomobil
load more comments
(1 replies)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W
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.[8] Gothic (not Latin-based), by contrast, had simply used a letter based on the Greek Υ 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 borrowing the rune ⟨ᚹ⟩, adapted as the Latin letter wynn: ⟨ƿ⟩. In early Middle English, following the 11th-century Norman Conquest, ⟨uu⟩ regained popularity; by 1300, it had taken wynn's place in common use.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Fun fact, in Italian "w" is sometimes referred to as "doppia v" which is "double v".
view more: next ›