W now 6 years old (in the swedish alphabet) thanks to "Webb" | Hacker News Reader

W now 6 years old (in the swedish alphabet) thanks to "Webb"

wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.se

36 pointsfranze21 comments

For those of us who can only barely make sense of the Swedish language:

Background according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_alphabet :

Until recently the letter ‹w› was treated as a variant form of ‹v› at least for sorting purposes, and this practice is still commonly encountered. However, in 2005 the Swedish Academy separated the two letters in conformity with international lexicographic practice. They appear under separate headings in the 13th edition of Svenska Akademiens Ordlista, released on 10 April 2006.[1] ‹w› has nonetheless been an official letter in the Swedish alphabet, but sorted as if it were a ‹v›. The loanword webb is a word which has become rather common in Swedish since 1995.

From what I can gather from the linked post, this decision to include W was made on the 3rd of March 2005.

The text shown is basically an e-mail from a member of the Swedish Academy (http://www.svenskaakademien.se/web/en.aspx is their English site) confirming when the letter 'W' was first added to the official Swedish dictionary.

That dictionary (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svenska_Akademiens_Ordlista) is generally considered normative for the Swedish language, and thus this inclusion can be counted as some kind of "official" statement that yes, the Swedish alphabet does indeed include the letter 'W'.

Previously it was only used in names of people and places, and grouped with 'V' for sorting purposes.

As mentioned on the page we've had the letter for a long long time in the alphabet, however since almost no swedish words started with it, V and W were sorted together in dictionaries and other word lists like phone books.

The best part about that was that even though it has a separate pronunciation (V: 've' and W, 'dubbel-ve'), when used in abbreviations it is common to say 've' instead of 'dubbel-ve', so when the web came along everybody said 've ve ve dott' for www. instead of 'dubbel-ve dubbel-ve dubbel-ve dott'. Which is nice.

I think this is the same in Germany (www.google.de is pronounced vay-vay-vay google de).

I could be wrong though, I'm basing this off a net radio advert I heard in german once.

"vau" is V. It's quite distinct from W in German.

ahhh, so W is pronouced 'vay' and V is 'vau'. I see. I got the german pronunciation confused with the french (which is double-vay), and assumed that Germans were pronouncing 'w' as 'v' in www. But I was wrong. Thanks!

Also note that 'v' in German is hard (like an English 'f'), whereas 'w' is soft (like the English 'v'). There isn't really an equivalent of the English 'w' sound in German. (thus the correct pronunciation of 'Volkswagen' is closer to 'Folksvahgen' when applying the [unreliable] English phonetics)

The confusion works both ways, German speakers often pronounce English words with too hard v/w sounds, English speakers pronounce German words too soft v/w sounds. It's phenomenal how deeply ingrained these habits can be.

I think the correction below confused things rather than clarify because of its use of German spelling.

In German, the letter "v" is called "fau". The letter "w" is called "veh". What you heard, "veh-veh-veh" was, indeed, "www". "VW" (the company) is pronounced "fau-veh".

Of course, the German sound for "v" is "f", which is why the correction made things more confusing (in my opinion). The poster assumed that people would pronounce "vau" as "fau", since that's how Germans pronounce it, but English speakers who don't speak (or read) German can't know that it's meant to be pronounced that way.

Of course, we say "punkt" rather than "dot(t)".

Related Swedish Trivia: We pronounce "at" (@) as "snabel-a", where snabel is something like the elephant's trunk or proboscis. Basically an a with a long nose.

In dutch "@" is pronounced as "apestaartje" which means literally "monkey tail".

An overview of the literal meaning of @ in different languages can be found in:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_sign#.22Commercial_at.22_in_...

According to Wikipedia the oldest documented use of "@" is in an Italian mercantile document in 1537.

[Dutch] http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/@#Ander_gebruik_van_.40 [English] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_sign#History

Here is a small collection of mine (from 1996):

http://www.student.nada.kth.se/~f96-lla/@.html

While I would like to poke fun at the Swedes any day of the week, in Denmark the "alphabet song" still doesn't mention 'w' I believe ;)

I really like the domain name, I wonder how often it gets misspelled :)

A mere 700 years after it became commonplace in English :-)

And the English speaking world still calls it a double U. Maybe the Swedish should have settled for double V: vv ;-)

In French they do call it "double V". I wonder why in English it's U though.

Because originally in English it actually was "uu", not "vv".

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W#History if you want to understand why.

The English language comes from what is now Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands. A lot of influence from Old Norse, which is also what Swedish originates from.

Maybe Æ will be a part of English again in 700 years :)

just FYI, Chrome browser does a decent job in translating the page to English

Why do they have to add a new alphabet just to add new word ? Don't they have swedish equivalent of the word web ? This is insane.

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