Almost everyone’s path has crossed at some point with English, the most spoken language in the world. English taught in our country from the primary school level; some have had academic careers, others are a tool for the goal they want to achieve.
No matter what position English is in your life, if you have studied the language, at some point you probably have the following question: Why is the letter ‘W’ pronounced as a ‘double U’, that is, ‘double U’, even though it looks like two ‘V’s are standing side by side?
To answer this question, we need to go back to the Middle Ages.
The letter ‘W’ was first used in the Middle Ages. In the Old English written language, ancient runes were used along with letters from the Latin alphabet. One of the runes used in the alphabet was the Wynn rune.
‘What is a rune?’ If you ask; The runic writing system is based on Norse mythology, and the word itself means ‘magical symbol’ or ‘hidden knowledge’. Most symbols in the runic alphabet are universal and represent many attributes of the concept with which it is associated. For example, a rune related to fertility; characterizes soil, agriculture, food and similar elements related to this concept.
Wynn was used when two ‘U’ letters came together in words and described the sound. So, as you can see, the rune Wynn represented the ‘double U’ pronunciation for short. The base of the letter is based here.
So what happened to get the ‘W’ shape in the modern English alphabet?
The letter ‘W’, which is also featured in Webtekno, came into its present form with the birth of the modern printing press. The pronunciation of the letter ‘V’ in German changes depending on where it is in the word. Printers began to print as ‘vv’ in order to show these pronunciation differences in written language.
After the printing press developed in Germany, printing houses began to produce stock letter printing tools for letters in the alphabet. After a while, as the use of two ‘V’ letters increased, printing houses turned this combination, which was specially produced for this sound, into a letter. Thus, the letter ‘W’ as we know it today emerged.
In fact, this letter is actually pronounced as ‘double V’, that is, ‘double V’ in many languages, especially Latin-based languages.
What happened that the British began to call this letter ‘double U’?
Patterns of letters printed in Germany began to be distributed all over the world, and England was one of the countries where these patterns were distributed. When these patterns reached their hands, the British saw the letter ‘W’ for the first time, which had not been included in their alphabet until that day.
Instead of adding a new letter to their alphabet, the English thought of replacing the letter ‘W’ with the rune Wynn, which represents the ‘uu’ sound in their alphabet. The Wynn rune was sometimes spelled ‘uu’ instead of the icon in the first subtitle image.
The English changed these two letters because the rune Wynn resembled the new letter ‘W’ when written as ‘uu’. They named this letter ‘double U’ because it was previously pronounced as ‘uu’.
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