as a young English speaker first learning the Latin alphabet, one letter stood out.
a mysterious letter with a strange name.
“w”.
unlike practically every other letter in the Latin alphabet, w has a name which in no way
reflects its pronunciation.
it makes the sound /w/, and yet it isn’t called “we” or “way”.
instead, it’s named for its shape, “double u”, which would solve the mystery if it
weren’t shaped more like a double v instead.
of course, as a child I never thought of the alphabet and its letters as having been designed
by anyone.
as far as I knew, the letter w and its confusing name were created along with the universe
itself at the dawn of time.
in reality, the alphabet was a human invention.
the letter w came from a series of decisions made by real people.
like every invention, there is a story behind w, and a fascinating story at that.
this is the story of w.
our story begins in ancient Egypt, nearly four thousand years ago.
at this point in time, written language had existed in Egypt for centuries, using a writing
system we today call “hieroglyphics”.
hieroglyphics were based on a rather elegant idea.
to write any given word, you could essentially take all of its sounds and simply draw a picture
of something with a name in Egyptian that starts with each sound.
that’s a massive oversimplification, but it gets the general idea across.
using this system worked great for writing Egyptian, and thanks to the wonders of papyrus
it was far more portable than the older cuneiform used in the North.
but in its design there was a very clear limitation.
hieroglyphics simply could not be used to write any language other than Egyptian. and
it was this limitation that led to the creation of what is likely the single most important
invention in human history.
in a turquoise mine in the Sinai Peninsula, a miner scratches a short phrase into a wall,
written in their native tongue, a language in the Northwest Semitic family.
it’s the oldest known text written in a writing system that would go on to influence
writing itself everywhere, forever.
a writing system that took the idea behind hieroglyphics and adapted it into something
simpler, something that could be used to write multiple different languages.
the first international phonetic alphabet, the Proto-Sinaitic script.
each letter is always pronounced as the first sound in the name of the thing it represents.
compared to Hieroglyphics, the shapes are more abstract, easier to write, faster to
use.
this is the oldest traceable direct ancestor of the modern Latin alphabet, and it is here
where we meet our protagonist.
this is the letter wāw.
like every letter in the Proto-Sinaitic script, it makes the first sound in its name, which
in this case is /w/.
looking at this shape, you might wonder exactly what specific thing it could represent.
it strongly resembles one particular hieroglyph, which represents a mace.
𓌉 but the name wāw is more likely to have meant
“fowl”, which implies that this circle and line are just a really, really abstract
representation of a bird.
whatever the case may be, this is simply the oldest form of the letter wāw. over time,
its shape changed.
when writing the letter wāw, its loop would often not be closed all the way, gradually
opening up more and more until eventually it stopped looking like a circle at all.
and then, the two strokes were connected, forming a shape that could be written without
lifting your stylus. this continuous hook shaped wāw is the ancestor of letters found
in many modern writing systems used all over the world, from the Arabic alphabet to Devanagari,
from the Mongolian script to the Java script.
the Semitic, Brahmic, and other scripts which contain some hook-shaped-wāw-derived letter
are collectively used by billions of people from different cultures.
this form of wāw, however, is not the main character of this story.
meanwhile, in Phoenicia, the letter wāw changed in a completely different way, becoming pointier,
forming a shape that certainly will look familiar to you, though, you might say “why?”,
as it doesn’t resemble the letter this story is about.
trust me, we’ll get to that.
the Phoenicians probably didn’t think of themselves as having invented their alphabet.
the changes that happened from the Proto-Sinaitic script to the Phoenician alphabet were so
gradual they likely went completely unnoticed.
like wāw, other letters changed forms, and some were dropped entirely because they were
unnecessary for writing the Phoenician language.
under the hood, however, it remained the same basic alphabet with the same basic function.
one change was made to the way wāw was used around the second century BC. the Phoenician
alphabet didn’t have any letters for vowel sounds, a trait inherited from Egyptian.
this was a problem, since like other Semitic languages, vowels held important morphological
information.
the solution Phoenician phoneticians came up with was to give some letters alternate
vowel readings.
wāw was one of these letters to get a second pronunciation, the vowel /u/. this makes perfect
sense, because /w/ and /u/ are basically the same sound.
however, this was many centuries later, and it was only partially implemented at the point
when the Phoenicians taught the Greeks how to write.
in the eighth century BC, the Phoenician alphabet made its way to Greece.
according to legend, the one responsible was the hero Cadmus, a Phoenician prince and monster
slayer.
the real life analogue to Cadmus, who I’ll just refer to as “Cadmus” from here on
out as a convenient shorthand, lived in Greece and could write Phoenician fluently.
it probably only seemed natural to Cadmus to use the same system to write their other
language.
however, while the Phoenician alphabet was great for Semitic languages, the Greek language
was dramatically different.
this meant that new letters would need to be created.
the one specific new distinction relevant to our story is that between the consonant
/w/ and the vowel /u/.
as we’ve seen, the letter wāw represented the consonant /w/, and occasionally could
represent the vowel /u/ as well.
for writing Greek, however, this wasn’t good enough.
the difference between the two sounds was significant, and so a new letter needed to
be created.
therefore, for the consonant /w/, the letter wāw was used, keeping its name and its position
in the alphabet, and for the vowel /u/, a new letter, originally plainly named “u”
but later renamed to “upsilon”, was placed towards the end of the alphabet.
oh, oops! sorry, got those switched.
yes, the one with the new name, new position in the alphabet, and new pronunciation is
the one that kept the shape of wāw. because of this, these letters, wau and upsilon, are
said to both be direct descendants of wāw, rather than one coming from wāw and the other
being invented by Cadmus.
this is the story of w, and the bloodline of w is through upsilon, and not through the
Greek wau. however, I believe it would be unjust to fully ignore the story of wau, which
is interesting in its own right.
if you are familiar with the Greek alphabet but not with its history, the letter wau might
be unfamiliar to you, and that’s because not long after the invention of the Greek
alphabet the sound wau represented began to disappear from the Greek language.
in the majority of Greek dialects, the sound /w/ vanished without a trace.
from “wau” to “au”.
although wau was no longer used in writing, it wasn’t forgotten.
the Greek alphabet was also used as a numbering system.
wau, being the sixth letter of the alphabet, represented the number six.
this use of wau remained, but it was given a new name reflecting its shape: “digamma”,
“double g”.
over time, digamma began to change its form, becoming less angular, more curvy. this new
shape no longer resembled the double gamma it was named after, and so this letter with
no sound, separated from its alphabet, was completely stigmatized.
however, this happened in the seventh century BC, and wau was still fully intact when the
Greeks taught the Etruscans how to write.
less than a century after Cadmus adapted the Phoenician alphabet to be able to write Greek,
it spread throughout the Greek colonies, making its way to Italy, which at the time was home
to the Etruscans.
the Etruscans spoke a language with no modern relatives.
I don’t know if they told legends about the day they were introduced to the miracle
of written word, but these early adopters of the Greek alphabet seemed to want to use
it to write their language as closely as possible to the way their Greek speaking neighbors
wrote theirs.
at first, the two alphabets were indeed one and the same, but as the Greek alphabet changed
over time, the Etruscan alphabet didn’t change with it, causing the two to slowly
diverge. this left it looking like an older version of the Greek alphabet, which is essentially
what it was.
there were some major differences between the phonologies of Greek and Etruscan, but
most of these were simply sounds present in Greek that weren’t present in Etruscan.
these letters were simply not used, and eventually were dropped from the alphabet.
there was only one case of the inverse, a sound in Etruscan that wasn’t in Greek:
/f/. at the time, the Greek alphabet had no way of writing this sound, and so Etruscan
scribes had to come up with some way of representing it.
their solution was not to create a new letter, but to put existing letters in an order that
suggests the right sound.
/f/ is a breathy sort of sound made with the lips, so perhaps it can be written with this
letter which makes a lippy sort of sound, /w/, followed by this letter which makes a
breathy sort of sound, /h/.
these two letters together, /w/ followed by /h/, could then be read as the sound /f/.
eventually, this digraph was replaced with a new single letter.
however, that was centuries later, and /f/ was still written with a digraph when the
Etruscan alphabet was Italicized.
the alphabet spread throughout the Italian peninsula, and began to be used for writing
the Italic languages spoken in the region.
one particular Italic tribe, the Latins, spoke a language that ended up being rather historically
significant.
the Latin scribes who adapted the Etruscan alphabet for their language, participating
in a centuries old tradition, found some letters to be unnecessary and dropped them from the
alphabet, and it seemed like our good old friend wau was going to be one of these.
why is there a letter for /w/ separate from /u/, they reasoned, when /j/ and /i/ are written
the same way?
however, there was more to it.
after all, wau was used in that digraph necessary to write /f/! so then, if wau is only necessary
as part of this digraph, why not have it stand for the sound /f/ on its own? and so “wau”
became “ef”, and upsilon, which at this point still had its simpler name “u”,
once again could stand for both /w/ and /u/.
and then the shape of this u, (or, using its English name, “yu”) for the first time
since making its way into Europe, simplified.
its stem was removed, turning it into a simple angle.
meanwhile, something was happening to Greek vowels, a sound shift known as “iotacism”,
or “oops! all /i/”, where a bunch of different vowels all started to be pronounced like /i/.
upsilon was one of these vowels affected, changing from /u/ to /y/, and, eventually,
to /i/.
in the first century BC, Greece became part of Rome, and it became necessary to use the
Latin alphabet to write Greek, and those extra letters abandoned centuries ago suddenly didn’t
seem so unnecessary.
two new letters were added to the end of the Latin alphabet specifically to write Greek
words.
at the very end was the Greek letter zeta, a voiced sibilant, and right before it was
the letter upsilon, which, one, still wasn’t actually called upsilon yet; two, no longer
sounded enough like /u/ to be written with the Latin letter u; and three, still hadn’t
fully iotacized into /i/.
this strange Greek vowel was given the name “ī Graeca”, “Greek i”, and it brought
the total number of letters in the Latin alphabet descended from wāw up to three.
so that’s why [beat]
a couple centuries later, the sound /w/ in Latin turned into [β], making the two different
pronunciations of u more noticeably different.
/u/ as a vowel, /β/ as a consonant.
this was fine, however, because it was predictable which pronunciation was used based on context
alone.
so that was the state of the Latin alphabet when it was first used to write Old High German
and Old English.
Germanic languages had been written using their own runic alphabet for centuries.
these runes had their own history which I’m just not going to even bother with because
only one rune actually matters to this story, and as far as I can tell it wasn’t based
on anything that came before it.
this is the letter “wynn”, and like many other letters that we’ve looked at, it represents
the sound /w/. when the Latin alphabet was first used for writing Germanic languages,
including Old High German and Old English, dealing with wynn was a problem.
the Latin letter u could be used as the equivalent of the rune “ur”, which similarly represented
the vowel /u/. this vowel sound, as we’ve seen, is basically the same thing as the consonant
/w/, so it might make sense to use it as a consonant for wynn. however, this didn’t
work, because it was clearly established by then that the letter u as a consonant represented
the sound /β/.
there needed to be some other way of differentiating wynn from ur in the Latin script, and the
solution scribes came up with was, well, it was fine.
it worked okay.
why not, they gathered, just put two u’s together and call it a day? and that’s exactly
what they did.
and that, after millennia of history, is where “double u” is from.
but this isn’t the end of the story.
in the Middle Ages, scribes began to write double u with their branches crossing, making
it look more like a single letter.
around the same time, it became conventional to write the letter u in two distinct ways.
the pointier u was used only at the beginnings of words, but elsewhere it became more rounded.
don’t be confused, however: these are still, in fact, the same letter.
however, in general, u at the beginnings of words was more likely to be a consonant, which
eventually led to a new convention, using the pointier u for a consonant and the rounder
u as a vowel.
it took a very long time for this to turn into a fully recognized separate letter, by
which I mean it took until literally the seventeenth century.
before then, people were just like using this one letter for two separate things and it
has a different shape depending on what thing it’s being used for but it’s still totally
one letter and not two different letters you guys!
knowing this, I’m sure you’ll agree that it was only natural to continue to call this
digraph “double u” when it was first recognized as a separate letter and not just a pair of
u’s. after all, “v” was still simply a varient of u, nothing more.
and that, finally, is where the Latin alphabet stands today, with five distinct letters with
one common origin.
f, y, u, v, and w, all directly descended from a bird that looked like a lollypop.
since its inception, w has been used for its intended purpose, to represent the sound /w/.
and, in English at least, that is still its main use.
however, like most other letters of the Latin alphabet, it’s used differently in other
languages.
most amazingy is its use in the language w was first designed for, High German.
not long after the Latin alphabet was first adapted for it, history repeated itself, and
a sound shift turned /w/ into [v], the value it has in Modern German to this day.
what this means is that if High German had held onto its runic alphabet for just a few
more generations before adapting the Latin alphabet, the letter w wouldn’t have needed
to be invented in the first place!
this Germanic use of w has made its way into other languages that do not have this same
history, including Polish.
other languages, such as Welsh, use it as a vowel rather than as a consonant, which,
if you think of it as literally being a double u, makes perfect sense.
the Polynesian language Māori, spoken in New Zealand, uses the letter w quite typically
for the consonant /w/, but additionally, almost poetically when you think about it, also uses
it as part of the digraph for writing the consonant /ɸ/, exactly like the Etruscans
did over a thousand years before.
the most interesting uses of w, however, come from languages that aren’t written with
alphabets to begin with.
the Cherokee syllabary, created for the North American language Cherokee in the 1810s, was
based aesthetically, but not functionally, on the Latin alphabet.
its creator, Sequoyah, was completely unfamiliar with how the Latin alphabet worked, but incredibly
still had a go trying to copy it for his own language anyway.
the result is one of the very few examples in history of a writing system made completely
“from scratch”, invented by an otherwise illiterate person.
two Cherokee syllables had their shapes based on the letter w, “la” and “ta”.
in Japanese, the letter w has two meanings outside of its basic use as a letter.
one, based on its name, is for the English word “double”, or “daburu”. this sounds
close enough to “daburyū” for it to make sense as a convenient shortening of the three
characters that would otherwise be necessary.
the other use of w in Japanese is short for the word for “laugh”, “warai”, and
it’s basically the Japanese equivalent of “lol”.
the history of writing is full of stories, and the story of w is my favorite.
spanning half a dozen languages across four thousand years, w certainly has come a long
way.
thanks for watching.
I’ve been jan Misali, and w