as a young English speaker first learning
the Latin alphabet, one letter stood out. a mysterious letter with a strange name. âwâ. unlike practically every other letter in the
Latin alphabet, w has a name which in no way reflects its pronunciation. it makes the sound /w/, and yet it isnât
called âweâ or âwayâ. instead, itâs named for its shape, âdouble
uâ, which would solve the mystery if it werenât shaped more like a double v instead. of course, as a child I never thought of the
alphabet and its letters as having been designed by anyone. as far as I knew, the letter w and its confusing
name were created along with the universe itself at the dawn of time. in reality, the alphabet was a human invention. the letter w came from a series of decisions
made by real people. like every invention, there is a story behind
w, and a fascinating story at that. this is the story of w. our story begins in ancient Egypt, nearly
four thousand years ago. at this point in time, written language had
existed in Egypt for centuries, using a writing system we today call âhieroglyphicsâ. hieroglyphics were based on a rather elegant
idea. to write any given word, you could essentially
take all of its sounds and simply draw a picture of something with a name in Egyptian that
starts with each sound. thatâs a massive oversimplification, but
it gets the general idea across. using this system worked great for writing
Egyptian, and thanks to the wonders of papyrus it was far more portable than the older cuneiform
used in the North. but in its design there was a very clear limitation. hieroglyphics simply could not be used to
write any language other than Egyptian. and it was this limitation that led to the creation
of what is likely the single most important invention in human history. in a turquoise mine in the Sinai Peninsula,
a miner scratches a short phrase into a wall, written in their native tongue, a language
in the Northwest Semitic family. itâs the oldest known text written in a
writing system that would go on to influence writing itself everywhere, forever. a writing system that took the idea behind
hieroglyphics and adapted it into something simpler, something that could be used to write
multiple different languages. the first international phonetic alphabet,
the Proto-Sinaitic script. each letter is always pronounced as the first
sound in the name of the thing it represents. compared to Hieroglyphics, the shapes are
more abstract, easier to write, faster to use. this is the oldest traceable direct ancestor
of the modern Latin alphabet, and it is here where we meet our protagonist. this is the letter wÄw. like every letter in the Proto-Sinaitic script,
it makes the first sound in its name, which in this case is /w/. looking at this shape, you might wonder exactly
what specific thing it could represent. it strongly resembles one particular hieroglyph,
which represents a mace. đ
but the name wÄw is more likely to have meant âfowlâ, which implies that this circle
and line are just a really, really abstract representation of a bird. whatever the case may be, this is simply the
oldest form of the letter wÄw. over time, its shape changed. when writing the letter wÄw, its loop would
often not be closed all the way, gradually opening up more and more until eventually
it stopped looking like a circle at all. and then, the two strokes were connected,
forming a shape that could be written without lifting your stylus. this continuous hook
shaped wÄw is the ancestor of letters found in many modern writing systems used all over
the world, from the Arabic alphabet to Devanagari, from the Mongolian script to the Java script. the Semitic, Brahmic, and other scripts which
contain some hook-shaped-wÄw-derived letter are collectively used by billions of people
from different cultures. this form of wÄw, however, is not the main
character of this story. meanwhile, in Phoenicia, the letter wÄw changed
in a completely different way, becoming pointier, forming a shape that certainly will look familiar
to you, though, you might say âwhy?â, as it doesnât resemble the letter this story
is about. trust me, weâll get to that. the Phoenicians probably didnât think of
themselves as having invented their alphabet. the changes that happened from the Proto-Sinaitic
script to the Phoenician alphabet were so gradual they likely went completely unnoticed. like wÄw, other letters changed forms, and
some were dropped entirely because they were unnecessary for writing the Phoenician language. under the hood, however, it remained the same
basic alphabet with the same basic function. one change was made to the way wÄw was used
around the second century BC. the Phoenician alphabet didnât have any letters for vowel
sounds, a trait inherited from Egyptian. this was a problem, since like other Semitic
languages, vowels held important morphological information. the solution Phoenician phoneticians came
up with was to give some letters alternate vowel readings. wÄw was one of these letters to get a second
pronunciation, the vowel /u/. this makes perfect sense, because /w/ and /u/ are basically the
same sound. however, this was many centuries later, and
it was only partially implemented at the point when the Phoenicians taught the Greeks how
to write. in the eighth century BC, the Phoenician alphabet
made its way to Greece. according to legend, the one responsible was
the hero Cadmus, a Phoenician prince and monster slayer. the real life analogue to Cadmus, who Iâll
just refer to as âCadmusâ from here on out as a convenient shorthand, lived in Greece
and could write Phoenician fluently. it probably only seemed natural to Cadmus
to use the same system to write their other language. however, while the Phoenician alphabet was
great for Semitic languages, the Greek language was dramatically different. this meant that new letters would need to
be created. the one specific new distinction relevant
to our story is that between the consonant /w/ and the vowel /u/. as weâve seen, the letter wÄw represented
the consonant /w/, and occasionally could represent the vowel /u/ as well. for writing Greek, however, this wasnât
good enough. the difference between the two sounds was
significant, and so a new letter needed to be created. therefore, for the consonant /w/, the letter
wÄw was used, keeping its name and its position in the alphabet, and for the vowel /u/, a
new letter, originally plainly named âuâ but later renamed to âupsilonâ, was placed
towards the end of the alphabet. oh, oops! sorry, got those switched. yes, the one with the new name, new position
in the alphabet, and new pronunciation is the one that kept the shape of wÄw. because
of this, these letters, wau and upsilon, are said to both be direct descendants of wÄw,
rather than one coming from wÄw and the other being invented by Cadmus. this is the story of w, and the bloodline
of w is through upsilon, and not through the Greek wau. however, I believe it would be
unjust to fully ignore the story of wau, which is interesting in its own right. if you are familiar with the Greek alphabet
but not with its history, the letter wau might be unfamiliar to you, and thatâs because
not long after the invention of the Greek alphabet the sound wau represented began to
disappear from the Greek language. in the majority of Greek dialects, the sound
/w/ vanished without a trace. from âwauâ to âauâ. although wau was no longer used in writing,
it wasnât forgotten. the Greek alphabet was also used as a numbering
system. wau, being the sixth letter of the alphabet,
represented the number six. this use of wau remained, but it was given
a new name reflecting its shape: âdigammaâ, âdouble gâ. over time, digamma began to change its form,
becoming less angular, more curvy. this new shape no longer resembled the double gamma
it was named after, and so this letter with no sound, separated from its alphabet, was
completely stigmatized. however, this happened in the seventh century
BC, and wau was still fully intact when the Greeks taught the Etruscans how to write. less than a century after Cadmus adapted the
Phoenician alphabet to be able to write Greek, it spread throughout the Greek colonies, making
its way to Italy, which at the time was home to the Etruscans. the Etruscans spoke a language with no modern
relatives. I donât know if they told legends about
the day they were introduced to the miracle of written word, but these early adopters
of the Greek alphabet seemed to want to use it to write their language as closely as possible
to the way their Greek speaking neighbors wrote theirs. at first, the two alphabets were indeed one
and the same, but as the Greek alphabet changed over time, the Etruscan alphabet didnât
change with it, causing the two to slowly diverge. this left it looking like an older
version of the Greek alphabet, which is essentially what it was. there were some major differences between
the phonologies of Greek and Etruscan, but most of these were simply sounds present in
Greek that werenât present in Etruscan. these letters were simply not used, and eventually
were dropped from the alphabet. there was only one case of the inverse, a
sound in Etruscan that wasnât in Greek: /f/. at the time, the Greek alphabet had no
way of writing this sound, and so Etruscan scribes had to come up with some way of representing
it. their solution was not to create a new letter,
but to put existing letters in an order that suggests the right sound. /f/ is a breathy sort of sound made with the
lips, so perhaps it can be written with this letter which makes a lippy sort of sound,
/w/, followed by this letter which makes a breathy sort of sound, /h/. these two letters together, /w/ followed by
/h/, could then be read as the sound /f/. eventually, this digraph was replaced with
a new single letter. however, that was centuries later, and /f/
was still written with a digraph when the Etruscan alphabet was Italicized. the alphabet spread throughout the Italian
peninsula, and began to be used for writing the Italic languages spoken in the region. one particular Italic tribe, the Latins, spoke
a language that ended up being rather historically significant. the Latin scribes who adapted the Etruscan
alphabet for their language, participating in a centuries old tradition, found some letters
to be unnecessary and dropped them from the alphabet, and it seemed like our good old
friend wau was going to be one of these. why is there a letter for /w/ separate from
/u/, they reasoned, when /j/ and /i/ are written the same way? however, there was more to it. after all, wau was used in that digraph necessary
to write /f/! so then, if wau is only necessary as part of this digraph, why not have it stand
for the sound /f/ on its own? and so âwauâ became âefâ, and upsilon, which at this
point still had its simpler name âuâ, once again could stand for both /w/ and /u/. and then the shape of this u, (or, using its
English name, âyuâ) for the first time since making its way into Europe, simplified. its stem was removed, turning it into a simple
angle. meanwhile, something was happening to Greek
vowels, a sound shift known as âiotacismâ, or âoops! all /i/â, where a bunch of different
vowels all started to be pronounced like /i/. upsilon was one of these vowels affected,
changing from /u/ to /y/, and, eventually, to /i/. in the first century BC, Greece became part
of Rome, and it became necessary to use the Latin alphabet to write Greek, and those extra
letters abandoned centuries ago suddenly didnât seem so unnecessary. two new letters were added to the end of the
Latin alphabet specifically to write Greek words. at the very end was the Greek letter zeta,
a voiced sibilant, and right before it was the letter upsilon, which, one, still wasnât
actually called upsilon yet; two, no longer sounded enough like /u/ to be written with
the Latin letter u; and three, still hadnât fully iotacized into /i/. this strange Greek vowel was given the name
âÄŤ Graecaâ, âGreek iâ, and it brought the total number of letters in the Latin alphabet
descended from wÄw up to three. so thatâs why [beat] a couple centuries later, the sound /w/ in
Latin turned into [β], making the two different pronunciations of u more noticeably different. /u/ as a vowel, /β/ as a consonant. this was fine, however, because it was predictable
which pronunciation was used based on context alone. so that was the state of the Latin alphabet
when it was first used to write Old High German and Old English. Germanic languages had been written using
their own runic alphabet for centuries. these runes had their own history which Iâm
just not going to even bother with because only one rune actually matters to this story,
and as far as I can tell it wasnât based on anything that came before it. this is the letter âwynnâ, and like many
other letters that weâve looked at, it represents the sound /w/. when the Latin alphabet was
first used for writing Germanic languages, including Old High German and Old English,
dealing with wynn was a problem. the Latin letter u could be used as the equivalent
of the rune âurâ, which similarly represented the vowel /u/. this vowel sound, as weâve
seen, is basically the same thing as the consonant /w/, so it might make sense to use it as a
consonant for wynn. however, this didnât work, because it was clearly established by
then that the letter u as a consonant represented the sound /β/. there needed to be some other way of differentiating
wynn from ur in the Latin script, and the solution scribes came up with was, well, it
was fine. it worked okay. why not, they gathered, just put two uâs
together and call it a day? and thatâs exactly what they did. and that, after millennia of history, is where
âdouble uâ is from. but this isnât the end of the story. in the Middle Ages, scribes began to write
double u with their branches crossing, making it look more like a single letter. around the same time, it became conventional
to write the letter u in two distinct ways. the pointier u was used only at the beginnings
of words, but elsewhere it became more rounded. donât be confused, however: these are still,
in fact, the same letter. however, in general, u at the beginnings of
words was more likely to be a consonant, which eventually led to a new convention, using
the pointier u for a consonant and the rounder u as a vowel. it took a very long time for this to turn
into a fully recognized separate letter, by which I mean it took until literally the seventeenth
century. before then, people were just like using this
one letter for two separate things and it has a different shape depending on what thing
itâs being used for but itâs still totally one letter and not two different letters you
guys! knowing this, Iâm sure youâll agree that
it was only natural to continue to call this digraph âdouble uâ when it was first recognized
as a separate letter and not just a pair of uâs. after all, âvâ was still simply
a varient of u, nothing more. and that, finally, is where the Latin alphabet
stands today, with five distinct letters with one common origin. f, y, u, v, and w, all directly descended
from a bird that looked like a lollypop. since its inception, w has been used for its
intended purpose, to represent the sound /w/. and, in English at least, that is still its
main use. however, like most other letters of the Latin
alphabet, itâs used differently in other languages. most amazingy is its use in the language w
was first designed for, High German. not long after the Latin alphabet was first
adapted for it, history repeated itself, and a sound shift turned /w/ into [v], the value
it has in Modern German to this day. what this means is that if High German had
held onto its runic alphabet for just a few more generations before adapting the Latin
alphabet, the letter w wouldnât have needed to be invented in the first place! this Germanic use of w has made its way into
other languages that do not have this same history, including Polish. other languages, such as Welsh, use it as
a vowel rather than as a consonant, which, if you think of it as literally being a double
u, makes perfect sense. the Polynesian language MÄori, spoken in
New Zealand, uses the letter w quite typically for the consonant /w/, but additionally, almost
poetically when you think about it, also uses it as part of the digraph <wh> for writing
the consonant /ɸ/, exactly like the Etruscans did over a thousand years before. the most interesting uses of w, however, come
from languages that arenât written with alphabets to begin with. the Cherokee syllabary, created for the North
American language Cherokee in the 1810s, was based aesthetically, but not functionally,
on the Latin alphabet. its creator, Sequoyah, was completely unfamiliar
with how the Latin alphabet worked, but incredibly still had a go trying to copy it for his own
language anyway. the result is one of the very few examples
in history of a writing system made completely âfrom scratchâ, invented by an otherwise
illiterate person. two Cherokee syllables had their shapes based
on the letter w, âlaâ and âtaâ. in Japanese, the letter w has two meanings
outside of its basic use as a letter. one, based on its name, is for the English
word âdoubleâ, or âdaburuâ. this sounds close enough to âdaburyĹŤâ for it to make
sense as a convenient shortening of the three characters that would otherwise be necessary. the other use of w in Japanese is short for
the word for âlaughâ, âwaraiâ, and itâs basically the Japanese equivalent of
âlolâ. the history of writing is full of stories,
and the story of w is my favorite. spanning half a dozen languages across four
thousand years, w certainly has come a long way. thanks for watching. Iâve been jan Misali, and w
Super interesting! It's cool to see the evolution of something so ubiquitous, especially because it takes us through so many periods of world history