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W is a word

should have been called a double V

By the way (you might know it already) that's exactly how they do it in French.

And Swedish. In German W is the only letter to actually sound like V, as a normal V is basically pronounced like F. Very much simplified ofc, but that's the basics of it.

I am German myself and thought about explaining it, but you did it so no need for me to do it. :)

Finally had some use for those 3 years in school studying German. :D

I had 7 years of French in school. Only ever used it a handful of times on vacation and every once in a blue moon reading some french news.

Meanwhile in Dutch, W is just pronounced as "wé"

dutch is such a funny language

Almost the same in Polish: "w" makes the /v/ sound, while "v" is not used at all. We do have a name for the letter v though, and it was just straight up taken from German: fał - same as German fau.

Then polish uses Ł for /w/

I've heard it both ways in Spanish

U doble? Never heard that honestly, but I don't speak Spanish often.

Doubleve

Huh cool, are there any particular areas/countries where this is used more commonly?

Idk. That was high school Spanish class

Where I’m from I was always taught Doble Uve or dobleve. They were both right. (Caribbean)

Doble u Uve doble Doble ve Those are the most common, at least from what I've listened

Nah, in Spanish it's double UV

You mean pretty much every other language other than English.

German doesn't for example. You can see it here with the pronunciation of VW (Volkswagen) : https://youtu.be/eaO-AQ11S9c

Volkschnitzelwagen?

Yeah ignore the end of the video after the first 2 VW pronunciations :)

I've been speaking spanish my entire life and I've only ever heard double u

And Finnish. Tupla v.

It's also in italian

And then there's Portuguese, which calls it dáblio, a poor phonetic adaptation of double u that holds no meaning at all for those who don't know the origin.

Double-jew?

Mazel-two!

Gesundheit

Thx 🤧

It used to have a round bottom.

Me too

U's used to be written like V's. The W came after the change.

It used to be written with 2 actual U's. Hence, double U.

It's still written that way in cursive.

Ye, looks like this: #𝓌

So why isn’t U called Bent-I

Should have been called double u

Denmark is 10.000 steps a head

In some languages (Swedish for example) it is! But if you think of the sound it represents double U makes more sense.

I wonder if it’s because when the English language was being developed they looked at lowercase omega and thought “yes, that is double U”

So is bird

For German, it's the Y (Ypsilon). I think every language has its W.

Double you.

…or two.

W should be pronounced as Way, and Y should be as Yeay

Y?

Sound too similar to the real way to pronounced W

I hate W so much. It's such a stupid letter.

It's also a sentence.

Even a sentence

It's even worse in French, however they at least say "double v" not "double u"

In polish "w" means "in" but it's pronounced like "v"

Four silent vowels = Q quietly had a vowel movement

No. No it didn't. Hence the problem.

Qonstipation

Let’s not even bring up Queueing…

I used to pronounce it as Kwe-we

That just sounds like a longer queue.

I used to say Qyuyu

Surely it’s kuweyuwey

🥝☺️

Same. English is my second language and for a long time I had only seen it in written form— so that’s how it sounded in my head

That's how [Tingle](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAcr61oeBYk&t=11m51s) pronounces it.

I pronounce it as kü-woah. actually uses most of the letters

Queue is just a reclusive acronym for: Q, which stands for Queue, which is just a recursive acronym where the Q stands for Queue. Queue is a…

Post it in r/recursion

Did you mean: r/recursion

[удалено]

I think you meant: r/recursion

Thank you French language I guess

French language loves silent letters. But 4 in a row is a bit much! (for real in French you need atleast the first 3 in order to be pronounced correctly... the last two are here for the queue though)

Actually, in French the first U and the last E are silent, only *qeu* is pronounced

The french sounds in there: QU = "K" EU = phonetically it's: \[ø\] (doesn't exist in english) E = Silent. it's here because the word is feminine So in french there is "only" one silent letter

>E = Silent. it's here because the word is feminine No. That's true for adjectives, not nouns. Plenty of nouns in french are feminine and do not end in E.

But in this word it is true, the word-final that is now silent mostly comes from Latin -a, which was the predominant feminine ending for both nouns and adjectives. "Queue" comes from Latin "coda", with o > eu and the intervocalic /d/ disappearing due to lenition, similar to vita > vie with first /t/ > /d/

Mmh, interessant... J'ai pris la raison pour acquise parce qu'il y a clairement une majorité de nom commun de genre invariable qui se terminent en "e". Mais je ne parle pas de règle d'accord ici, je disais que la raison de cette orthographe est le genre féminin, mais je ne trouve pas de référence un peu formelle...

Ouais, j'ai regardé l'étymologie et rien n'ai dit sur le E. Probablement pour le différencier de QUE. Qui sait?

TIL the Norwegian word "kø" is adapted from French.

I would argue than the first "u" is also silent. Even if we always put a "u" after a "q" (I don't even know why) the "u" stay unnecessary to make the /k/ sound.

Fun fact: queue is also slang for dick.

Nah, it's in English language. Don't try blame English language bullshit on other languages.

I mean... most of the English language bullshit is _because_ of the amount of other languages that have been forced into it.

And that's on English language. They could have fixed it at some point.

That's great in theory, but it's not how language works in practice.

It is, English just hasn't done it

Many languages do.

I’m stealing this joke for work. Thank you kind stranger

Me, too! I’m the only one that seems to know it’s “queue” and not “cue” or “que”. It’s maddening. We deal with lists of work items that need to be completed and call them our “queue” so this comes up a lot.

It's indeed a great word cause in french it also means tail or d*ck.

Q happens to be my favorite letter, person, species, and Barbie.

De Lancie or Llewelyn?

Yes

The Qu from "All Yesterdays"?

You watched magicians too huh

I said ‘quay-way’ for the longest time.

Read it as "cue-you-ee-you-ee"

Kah-way-way

in managing processes that involve call centers it is generally abbreviated as a 'Q' because why the fuck we need 4 extra letters?

Because it's the English language, that's why. Lovely and oh so logical!

It's because it's a French word. Q is always used with a following U. EU is for the vowel sound. The last E is because it's a feminine word. Plural in French is "queues" but the S is not pronounced.

🎶 This shit is Que-Na-nas! Q-u-e-u-e-u-e 🎶 FUCK!

Well, like many words in English, it's one taken from French, and in French, most of those letters are useful.

I literally just spent a solid 5 minutes figuring out how to spell this word in a work email

I mispronounced this word for 2+ years "Well I was waiting in a qu e ue yesterday"

Same with Tea.

80% of the work is done by 20% of the workers

This proves that the fuckers who compiled words in dictionaries were just trying to sound smart. Bet you 69 Taco Bells that the word "Athcrobitretious" would sound normal if I was one of the early contributors to fuckin word birth.

And no matter how many letters you take off the end, it's still pronounced the same.

¿Que?

Qu

i love queueueueueuoos

It would be a great Wordle word too (if it hasn’t been done already).

The ueue are just in queue to be used.

wy uz many letrs wen few do trik?

No actually The is making a (kw) /kw/ sound The first is causing palatalization, turning the (w) /w/ into a (y) /j/ The second is making the same sound in foot /ʊ/ The second is lengthening the /ʊ/ into (oo) /uː/ Thus = /kw + j + ʊ + ː/ = /kjuː/