Why ‘double U’ and not ‘double V’. Wouldn’t ‘double V’ more logically follow ‘V’? Perhaps it has something to do with the way the letter was formed (shaped) initially, but I’m just guessing here…
Probably it comes from the Latin alphabet, which did not have a separate U and V. There was one letter, which has the form of the modern English V, which served a dual purpose…U as a vowel, and V as a consonant. Quite possibly that one letter was referred to as U.
I think in French, the letter W is called double-V. English, I guess, didn’t rename the W after the rounded U was introduced as a seperate letter.
I doubt this has anything to do with it directly, but the Greek lowercase Omega looks like a “w” (sort of).
It’s called a double-U because it is pronounced as you would pronounce two u’s.
In Welsh, W is one of their most commonly used vowels.
You’re quite right in saying that, in French, it is ‘double V’ (I should have added that in the OP). As for Latin, I could give you ‘civis’ (citizen) as an example: it is correctly pronounced ‘key-wiss’, so there might be something there… Mind you, French has borrowed much more liberally from Latin than English has.
One argument that I heard about the shared letter was that the V shape was easier to carve into stone, but it doesn’t entirely hold water, since much writing was done with a stylus and a wax tablet & also on paper scrolls after the eqyptian papyrus/paper discovery spread.
Also, most people admit that we are only guessing at pronounciation, people are trying to guess backwards from church/mediaeval latin & about the only thing everyone agrees on is that church latin is definitely wrong… v was used for pronounciation until fairly recently, when it was all change again!
Just wait till I get that time travel machine fixed…
Actually, I know this one. My main source is the sections at the beginning of the chapters of the AHD on the origins of each letter, augmented by what I’ve heard elsewhere.
U and V were once used interchangeably for the vowel and consonant sounds. By convention, v was used at the beginning of words, u in the middle, and the sound it represented was inferred from context. The separation of one for the consonant sound an the other for the vowel sound occurred fairly recently. Similar remarks apply to i, j and y, BTW.
When the Roman alphabet was adapted by medieval monks to represent English, they needed something for the important “w” sound which was not used in Latin (or had disappeared from it - I’ve heard both). They were writing in miniscules, and joined together two miniscule u’s to represent the sound, hence a “double u”. Since U and V were interchangeable at that point, forms of “w” with both rounded and pointy buttoms were also used. The pointy form looking like two v’s survives in modern typefaces, but it still called “double u”.