6 ms·

> At least it wasn't Wasa showing up.. *Vasa

• erk__ 3y ago
  Unless if it was a massive piece of crispbread. Do you have any idea of why the spelling was changed if you look in older texts a lot of the time Wasa was was used.
  • checkyoursudo 3y ago
    For a long time, the v and w were basically indistinct, until some decades ago. I don't remember exactly when. There might even be a law about it.
    • hnarn 3y ago
      There's no "law", but there was a lot of language reform in the 19th and 20th century. You can read more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_orthography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_orthography > Usage of the letters ⟨v⟩ and ⟨w⟩ was, as long as the Fraktur typeface was used, guided by the typeface. In Fraktur, ⟨w⟩ was used as a rule to indicate the sound [v], except for in loanwords of Latin or Romance origin, when ⟨v⟩ was used. In SAOL 1874-1900, which were not printed in Fraktur, the number of words using ⟨w⟩ was very small, and primarily tied to names (clown, darwinism, schweizeri). (...) The attempt to remove ⟨w⟩ was further evident in the 1923 edition. Since 1950 however, the use of ⟨w⟩ in loanwords has been more acceptable, as the number of loanwords has increased. Since 2006, ⟨w⟩ constitutes an individual letter of the alphabet in SAOL, sorted separately from ⟨v⟩. One rationalization I think we can be pretty happy about today that the article mentions is that [f,fv,hv] which all produced the same sound were unified into simply "v" in schools in the early 1900s.
• checkyoursudo 3y ago
  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. >.<
  • acadapter 3y ago
    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.
    • pavlov 3y ago
      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.
      • doikor 3y ago
        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.
        • pavlov 3y ago
          > “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.
    • marginalia_nu 3y ago
      It's also noteworthy that in Swedish, w is a double-v not a double-u.