9 ms·

There's even more fun history, in that & is a ligature of et. (Citation: same wikipedia page)

by Navarr 10y ago

talideon 10y ago
And W is a ligature of 'UU'.
- HelloNurse 10y ago
  More 'VV', per traditional Latin spelling. 'U' is a relatively new letter.
  - amyjess 10y ago
    Traditionally, the uppercase was written as 'V' and the lowercase as 'u', though sometimes the lowercase would be written as 'v' at the beginning of a word (compare with 's', which was written as 'ſ' except at the end of a word). It's not so much that 'U' was created as a brand-new letter as it was that they split 'V' and 'u' into separate letters.
    - masswerk 10y ago
      Traditionally, there was no uppercase and lowercase. These were actually just stylistic variations of the same letters. First, there were majuscules (uppercase only), then came minuscules (lower case). Following another trend of highlighting certain letters, e.g., the first in a sentence, for example in red ink, eventually majuscules were used for this purpose. Thus, uppercase and lowercase. Edit: "u" was another stylistic variation of "v" in minuscule alphabets. So the use of both of them side by side is rather an anachronism as it combines forms of two separate eras. Edit: Regarding the long form of "s", this is also an important part of the ligature "ß". There's still an ongoing discussion, whether it is for "ſs" (ss) or "ſʒ" (sz), and, if "ß" should be split into "SS" or "SZ" in German uppercase writing. (While entity escaping suggests "szlig", some sources and old typographic forms indicate that it may have been "ſs" originally.)
      - lambda 10y ago
        And the reason that they are named "uppercase" and "lowercase" is that in the early days of movable type, the majuscule letters were stored in a case above the miniscule letters. Furthermore, Roman and Italic are two entirely different styles of characters. For highlighting purposes, printers started using Italic within Roman text, and eventually pairs of Roman and Italic fonts became identified with each other, so that now typefaces generally include both of them.
        masswerk 10y ago
        It may also be interesting that these styles of writing characters originally went with different styles of filling a page. Around the first millennium horror vacui reigned the scriptoria and scribes tended to fill the whole of the page with as least of white space as possible. If there was space left at the end of a line or page, the last words were repeated, often framed by "va (...) cat". This style coincided with broken letter styles favoring the similarities in the various character forms. (We may observe that the upcoming use of white space in writing in order to structure text roughly coincides with the introduction of zero into the number system. We may also observe that the use of zero was already implied by the Roman abacus, but didn't propagate to writing numbers. This may be seen in the context of Roman writing dismissing interpunctuations originally imported from the Greek and eventually also dismissing spaces between words, as it was considered important for a reader to immerse in the text in order to reveal its meaning. This approach to writing and reading may also shed some light on the horror vacui that may be observed in medieval writing. For an opposite approach we may consider the Summa Theologiae, breaking down the text in structure and form so it provides a quick and easy orientation for where in the text we currently are. This approach brings also some new characters, like "¶" to mark the beginning of a paragraph. – Historically, there's been an ongoing discussion whether to favor legibility or rather illegibility in writing and letter forms, which is linked to the question, whether a text should reveal its meaning quickly, or rather resist a cursory reading.)
      - amyjess 10y ago
        All of that is correct, but I was thinking more of the Shakespearean era after the modern use of uppercase/lowercase arose but before V and U split into different letters. So back then you had, for example, "love" written as loue.
    - asveikau 10y ago
      The way I came to think of it when I studied Latin: V is the consonant version of U, just as J is the consonant version of I. When you put those vowel sounds next to another vowel (assuming a certain Romance pronunciation similar to modern Spanish or Italian), they tend to make that consonant sound (similar to English W or the consonant version of Y).
  - talideon 10y ago
    TL;DR: I personally thing both 'UU' and 'VV' are equally correct, given the history of the Latin alphabet's evolution. Given the subject matter, I'd disagree slightly, but we're getting into obscure territory: 'U' and 'V' were glyphs of the same letter, but the two glyphs ended up being used to represent the vowel and consonant respectively as new letters. 'V' was traditionally the glyph used in writing and carving owing to it being the easier glyph to carve with a chisel. In Roman Rustic caps (as seen in Virgil's writings), the 'V'/'U' was halfway in-between a 'V' and a 'U' in shape. When I say I disagree, I'm not saying you're wrong, BTW, so much that differentiating between 'U' and 'V' up until the late Middle Ages is difficult, complicated by the fact that the shift from 'UU'/'VV' to 'W' happened over a very long period of time, overlapping, IIRC, with 'U' and 'V' becoming separate letters.
    - samatman 10y ago
      To add some history to your opinion: In English we call it "double-u", whereas in French it is "double-v". It seems even at the time of invention there was a difference of opinion as to which letter w was doubling.
      - tigershark 10y ago
        Also in Spanish and Italian. And given that these three are all neo-latin languages, unlike English, I strongly suspect that the real origin of w is from VV, not UU.
        deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
        talideon 10y ago
        > neo-latin You mean 'Romance': Neo-Latin refers to the revived Latin from the Renaissance era, which is now used as a source of international scientific vocabulary. > I strongly suspect that the real origin of w is from VV, not UU. This is why I wrote what I wrote: the timeline for that doesn't match up. The 'W' ligature came along when 'V' and 'U' were glyphs of the same letter, not separate letters themselves. In fact, 'V'/'U' was generally pronounced when spelling it out the way you would've said 'U' at the time, with the name 'V' got coming later. In essence: it's equally right to say 'W' came from 'VV' as it is to say it came from 'UU', as they were the same thing up until surprisingly recently, to the extent that 'U' and 'V' weren't differentiated in French until the mid-1700s.
- dmreedy 10y ago
  Ancient Greek has an interesting coincidental evolution here in that its specific character for representing `/w/` was, in the classical period, referred to as digamma, literally 'double-gamma', because it looks like two gammas. The sound of digamma follows a similar usage of English 'w'[1], in that it is a 'consonantal doublet' of the Greek upsilon (both upsilon and digamma are derived from the same Phonecian letter, waw). However, the character itself doesn't have the same convenient surface-to-deep mapping, and it ended up as the Latin alphabet 'F'. If you want to one level deeper, the sound 'F' came to represent is the 'voiceless labiodental fricative'. This means it has a pairing in the pronunciation space with 'V', the 'voiced labiodental fricative'. So Greek 'Digamma' became Latin 'F' in form, which is paired with Latin 'V' which became English 'W' which originally was represented by Greek 'Digamma' in sound. None of this really means anything, but it tickles my brain. --- [1] Albeit with very different evolutionary paths; English 'w' was used, in part, to allow representation of both Germanic and Latinate words.
  - pygy_ 10y ago
    Do you know how we ended with the w-g mapping between Germanic languages and French? - William => Guillaume - War => Guerre - Wasp => Guêpe - Waffle => Gauffre All of these 'g's are pronounced as in "gas. "gu" makes the 'g' hard in front of vowels that would have made it soft.
    - dmreedy 10y ago
      It's thought to be part of a larger series of sound shifts that happened as Proto-Germanic branched off from Proto-Indo-European, called Grimm's Law[1]. Romance languages like French (along with other Indo-European languages, like Greek and Sanskrit), as far as we can tell, preserve more closely the original PIE sounds, with Germanic languages being the 'deviants'. It's also the reason why English has 'feather' and Romance languages have 'penna' or some derivative, and there are a bunch of other fun examples of cognates to be had. --- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimm's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimm's_law Of the Grimm Brothers, the same responsible for Grimm's Fairy Tales. Jacob was a philologist in addition to a mythologist.
adzm 10y ago
While on the subject, this is why you may see et cetera abbreviated as etc and &c. And if you think of the latter as "et c" you have a popular website Etsy that sells et cetera.
- freehunter 10y ago
  I've had so many people tell me there wasn't a directory called /etsy when I tell them to cd to /etc.
  - Kluny 10y ago
    You actually say it like etsy? I've always said something like "et-k" or just etcetera in full.
    - jat850 10y ago
      Not OP but I always say "etsy", and "etsy-d" for etcd. I have never explored if these are correct pronunciations or not...
      - Infernal 10y ago
        I have also always pronounced /etc as "etsy". I'm always thrown off when people say "ee tee see" or "etcetera", but that's pretty rare in my experience. The people who pronounce /usr as "you ess are" instead of "user" kind of drive me crazy though.
        freehunter 10y ago
        I almost always have to say "you ess are" because while many people I talk to confuse etc and etsy, nearly everyone tries to type "/user" when I tell them to go to "forward slash user". Even people who should know better.
        Infernal 10y ago

There's even more fun history, in that & is a ligature of et. (Citation: same wikipedia page)

by Navarr 10y ago

There's even more fun history, in that & is a ligature of et. (Citation: same wikipedia page)

talideon 10y ago

And W is a ligature of 'UU'.

HelloNurse 10y ago
More 'VV', per traditional Latin spelling. 'U' is a relatively new letter.
- amyjess 10y ago
  Traditionally, the uppercase was written as 'V' and the lowercase as 'u', though sometimes the lowercase would be written as 'v' at the beginning of a word (compare with 's', which was written as 'ſ' except at the end of a word). It's not so much that 'U' was created as a brand-new letter as it was that they split 'V' and 'u' into separate letters.
  - masswerk 10y ago
    Traditionally, there was no uppercase and lowercase. These were actually just stylistic variations of the same letters. First, there were majuscules (uppercase only), then came minuscules (lower case). Following another trend of highlighting certain letters, e.g., the first in a sentence, for example in red ink, eventually majuscules were used for this purpose. Thus, uppercase and lowercase. Edit: "u" was another stylistic variation of "v" in minuscule alphabets. So the use of both of them side by side is rather an anachronism as it combines forms of two separate eras. Edit: Regarding the long form of "s", this is also an important part of the ligature "ß". There's still an ongoing discussion, whether it is for "ſs" (ss) or "ſʒ" (sz), and, if "ß" should be split into "SS" or "SZ" in German uppercase writing. (While entity escaping suggests "szlig", some sources and old typographic forms indicate that it may have been "ſs" originally.)
    - lambda 10y ago
      And the reason that they are named "uppercase" and "lowercase" is that in the early days of movable type, the majuscule letters were stored in a case above the miniscule letters. Furthermore, Roman and Italic are two entirely different styles of characters. For highlighting purposes, printers started using Italic within Roman text, and eventually pairs of Roman and Italic fonts became identified with each other, so that now typefaces generally include both of them.
      - masswerk 10y ago
        It may also be interesting that these styles of writing characters originally went with different styles of filling a page. Around the first millennium horror vacui reigned the scriptoria and scribes tended to fill the whole of the page with as least of white space as possible. If there was space left at the end of a line or page, the last words were repeated, often framed by "va (...) cat". This style coincided with broken letter styles favoring the similarities in the various character forms. (We may observe that the upcoming use of white space in writing in order to structure text roughly coincides with the introduction of zero into the number system. We may also observe that the use of zero was already implied by the Roman abacus, but didn't propagate to writing numbers. This may be seen in the context of Roman writing dismissing interpunctuations originally imported from the Greek and eventually also dismissing spaces between words, as it was considered important for a reader to immerse in the text in order to reveal its meaning. This approach to writing and reading may also shed some light on the horror vacui that may be observed in medieval writing. For an opposite approach we may consider the Summa Theologiae, breaking down the text in structure and form so it provides a quick and easy orientation for where in the text we currently are. This approach brings also some new characters, like "¶" to mark the beginning of a paragraph. – Historically, there's been an ongoing discussion whether to favor legibility or rather illegibility in writing and letter forms, which is linked to the question, whether a text should reveal its meaning quickly, or rather resist a cursory reading.)
    - amyjess 10y ago
      All of that is correct, but I was thinking more of the Shakespearean era after the modern use of uppercase/lowercase arose but before V and U split into different letters. So back then you had, for example, "love" written as loue.
  - asveikau 10y ago
    The way I came to think of it when I studied Latin: V is the consonant version of U, just as J is the consonant version of I. When you put those vowel sounds next to another vowel (assuming a certain Romance pronunciation similar to modern Spanish or Italian), they tend to make that consonant sound (similar to English W or the consonant version of Y).
- talideon 10y ago
  TL;DR: I personally thing both 'UU' and 'VV' are equally correct, given the history of the Latin alphabet's evolution. Given the subject matter, I'd disagree slightly, but we're getting into obscure territory: 'U' and 'V' were glyphs of the same letter, but the two glyphs ended up being used to represent the vowel and consonant respectively as new letters. 'V' was traditionally the glyph used in writing and carving owing to it being the easier glyph to carve with a chisel. In Roman Rustic caps (as seen in Virgil's writings), the 'V'/'U' was halfway in-between a 'V' and a 'U' in shape. When I say I disagree, I'm not saying you're wrong, BTW, so much that differentiating between 'U' and 'V' up until the late Middle Ages is difficult, complicated by the fact that the shift from 'UU'/'VV' to 'W' happened over a very long period of time, overlapping, IIRC, with 'U' and 'V' becoming separate letters.
  - samatman 10y ago
    To add some history to your opinion: In English we call it "double-u", whereas in French it is "double-v". It seems even at the time of invention there was a difference of opinion as to which letter w was doubling.
    - tigershark 10y ago
      Also in Spanish and Italian. And given that these three are all neo-latin languages, unlike English, I strongly suspect that the real origin of w is from VV, not UU.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      - talideon 10y ago
        > neo-latin You mean 'Romance': Neo-Latin refers to the revived Latin from the Renaissance era, which is now used as a source of international scientific vocabulary. > I strongly suspect that the real origin of w is from VV, not UU. This is why I wrote what I wrote: the timeline for that doesn't match up. The 'W' ligature came along when 'V' and 'U' were glyphs of the same letter, not separate letters themselves. In fact, 'V'/'U' was generally pronounced when spelling it out the way you would've said 'U' at the time, with the name 'V' got coming later. In essence: it's equally right to say 'W' came from 'VV' as it is to say it came from 'UU', as they were the same thing up until surprisingly recently, to the extent that 'U' and 'V' weren't differentiated in French until the mid-1700s.
dmreedy 10y ago
Ancient Greek has an interesting coincidental evolution here in that its specific character for representing `/w/` was, in the classical period, referred to as digamma, literally 'double-gamma', because it looks like two gammas. The sound of digamma follows a similar usage of English 'w'[1], in that it is a 'consonantal doublet' of the Greek upsilon (both upsilon and digamma are derived from the same Phonecian letter, waw). However, the character itself doesn't have the same convenient surface-to-deep mapping, and it ended up as the Latin alphabet 'F'. If you want to one level deeper, the sound 'F' came to represent is the 'voiceless labiodental fricative'. This means it has a pairing in the pronunciation space with 'V', the 'voiced labiodental fricative'. So Greek 'Digamma' became Latin 'F' in form, which is paired with Latin 'V' which became English 'W' which originally was represented by Greek 'Digamma' in sound. None of this really means anything, but it tickles my brain. --- [1] Albeit with very different evolutionary paths; English 'w' was used, in part, to allow representation of both Germanic and Latinate words.
- pygy_ 10y ago
  Do you know how we ended with the w-g mapping between Germanic languages and French? - William => Guillaume - War => Guerre - Wasp => Guêpe - Waffle => Gauffre All of these 'g's are pronounced as in "gas. "gu" makes the 'g' hard in front of vowels that would have made it soft.
  - dmreedy 10y ago
    It's thought to be part of a larger series of sound shifts that happened as Proto-Germanic branched off from Proto-Indo-European, called Grimm's Law[1]. Romance languages like French (along with other Indo-European languages, like Greek and Sanskrit), as far as we can tell, preserve more closely the original PIE sounds, with Germanic languages being the 'deviants'. It's also the reason why English has 'feather' and Romance languages have 'penna' or some derivative, and there are a bunch of other fun examples of cognates to be had. --- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimm's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimm's_law Of the Grimm Brothers, the same responsible for Grimm's Fairy Tales. Jacob was a philologist in addition to a mythologist.

adzm 10y ago

While on the subject, this is why you may see et cetera abbreviated as etc and &c. And if you think of the latter as "et c" you have a popular website Etsy that sells et cetera.

freehunter 10y ago
I've had so many people tell me there wasn't a directory called /etsy when I tell them to cd to /etc.
- Kluny 10y ago
  You actually say it like etsy? I've always said something like "et-k" or just etcetera in full.
  - jat850 10y ago
    Not OP but I always say "etsy", and "etsy-d" for etcd. I have never explored if these are correct pronunciations or not...
    - Infernal 10y ago
      I have also always pronounced /etc as "etsy". I'm always thrown off when people say "ee tee see" or "etcetera", but that's pretty rare in my experience. The people who pronounce /usr as "you ess are" instead of "user" kind of drive me crazy though.
      - freehunter 10y ago
        I almost always have to say "you ess are" because while many people I talk to confuse etc and etsy, nearly everyone tries to type "/user" when I tell them to go to "forward slash user". Even people who should know better.
        Infernal 10y ago