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Comment by checkyoursudo | Hacker News Reader

In Swedish, the v and the w only became distinct pretty recently. There are still people alive today who don't know which to pick if they don't already know how a v-sounding word is spelled. Also, the same person might say "Vilma" one day and "Wilma" the next, just as an example of the confusion (and Wilma is their own daughter...) Also, also, I have had older Swedes be completely unable to hear a difference between v and (English-pronounced) w.

>.<

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V and W were considered two graphic variants of the same letter until about two decades ago.

The W sound was lost centuries ago but reintroduced with English words.

Yes. In Finnish and Swedish, the letters V and W traditionally collated together.

In other words, this is a correctly alphabetically ordered list:

  Wasa
  Virtanen
  Wiva
  Viwe

The rule was apparently changed in 2006 in Sweden though (with Finland presumably tagging along).

There’s probably still plenty of SQL installations around using the old collation rules because tables were created before the 2006 change reached database software.

It kinda depends. In a list of names, dictionaries, etc V and W would be separately. This is to make finding the word you are looking for easier.

Also in Finnish ÅÄÖ are the end of alphabet.

Also Ü and Ű would should be grouped with Y. Õ and Ő with Ö.

> “In a list of names, dictionaries, etc V and W would be separately. This is to make finding the word you are looking for easier.”

If you look at older phone books and dictionaries until the 1990s at least, you’ll find that V and W are combined.

There are common surnames in Finland that retain the V/W spelling equivalence, like Virtanen and Wirtanen. When they are grouped together (as they traditionally were), it’s easier to find a person by name because you don’t need to know which way it’s spelled.

It's also noteworthy that in Swedish, w is a double-v not a double-u.

In French also [1]

[1] https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/French/Alphabet

Just realized how weird it is we call it double-u when it is a double-v. Language is weird.

The history of u, v, double-u and double-v is really convoluted. They're the same letter but also not quite. There are historical reasons that make sense as to why this is.

In Japan, "L" and "R" are often interchangeable. Their pronunciation is somewhere between.

That's a cool story.

Japanese actually uses a different phoneme that is sort of halfway between an "r" and an "l" sound. Apparently, depending on where you are in the country, it may sound closer to one or the other. I learned to say it by consciously paying attention to the position of my tongue in my mouth and literally putting my tongue halfway in between the "r" and "l" positions. I actually learned to make the sound before I learned to hear it (which I can now, but I couldn't when I first learned of it). Source: married to a person who can speak Japanese.

In Arabic the hard "P" is often swapped with "B" and it's also the case that real pronunciation is somewhere between.

I think P and B are closer phonetically than L and R, though.