No Stupid Questions

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.

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.

Fun fact, in Italian "w" is sometimes referred to as "doppia v" which is "double v".

I am not 100% sure of the answer (I am sure there are websites where this is explained), but I am reasonably sure it has to do with the fact that V and U used to not be distinct letters, but variations of the same letter.

I find both of those names silly, I like the fact that my first language (German) doesn't call any letter "double" anything.

As someone whose native language has a "vee" and a "wee", the whole "double u/v" always seemed kind of weird.

I know the history of the letter (v turning into u later after being the same letter for centuries) but I never got why some languages stuck with the "double" letter for this long.

I may be wrong about the actual reason for this - as ‘double V’ is also quite common - and it may just end up being some kind of ‘well when the printing press came to England’ thing, but:

In the classical Latin alphabet, the letter ‘V’ was not actually representative of what we today recognise as the /u/ sound (or its variants). It was in fact the written form of the /u/ sound (and related variants). So when the W was introduced to the English alphabet, I guess it was indeed a ‘double /u/‘.

FWIW Spanish has both, depending on the dialect. I grew up saying doble-u, but I know other countries say doble-ve

The letter "W" is called "double U" because the Normans invented it by combining two pointed capital letters to represent the sound "w" in Anglo-Saxon words after the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. The name "double U" still indicates how the letter was created.

Before the Norman Conquest, the Latin letter "V" was used to represent both the "v" and "w" sounds. The Anglo-Saxons created a separate character called "wen" to represent the "w" sound. After the Norman Conquest, the Normans combined two pointed capital letters to create the "W" to represent the "w" sound in Anglo-Saxon words.

Ils sont juste bizzare les anglophones.

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.

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.)

I write my "w"s like "uu". With curves.

This is nvts. N. V. T. S.

just after 1600 the letters u an v switched. So if you read something written in 1590 it would use words like 'haue' (have) and heauie (heavy). This was two different unrelated switches somewhat seperated in time not an actual trade.

A lower case w in handwriting is more uu shaped, at least.