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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 t
by realugglan 16y ago
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.
- user24 16y agoI 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.
- mahrain 16y ago"vau" is V. It's quite distinct from W in German.
- user24 16y agoahhh, 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!
- pmjordan 16y agoAlso 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.
- StavrosK 16y agoI 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.
- Muzza 16y agoOf course, we say "punkt" rather than "dot(t)".
- zyfo 16y agoRelated 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.
- ojilles 16y agoIn 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_other_languages 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 http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/@#Ander_gebruik_van_.40 [English] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_sign#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_sign#History
- yesbabyyes 16y agoHere is a small collection of mine (from 1996): http://www.student.nada.kth.se/~f96-lla/@.html http://www.student.nada.kth.se/~f96-lla/@.html
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]