# Was the German word "Vater" ever pronounced with a v sound? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [October 4, 2024, 3:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-german-word-vater-ever-pronounced-with-a-v-sound/1008435 "2024-10-04T03:45:06Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 16\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![rowrrbazzle](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rowrrbazzle/32/414_2.png) [@rowrrbazzle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rowrrbazzle)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2024, 5:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-german-word-vater-ever-pronounced-with-a-v-sound/1008435/21 "2024-10-06T05:43:49Z")
The joke version. “Is it pronounced Hawai’i or Havai’i?” “Havai’i.” “Thank you.” “You’re velcome.” ---
**Author:** ![Treppenwitz](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/treppenwitz/32/3445_2.png) [@Treppenwitz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Treppenwitz)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2024, 4:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-german-word-vater-ever-pronounced-with-a-v-sound/1008435/22 "2024-10-06T16:21:05Z")
> [@EinsteinsHund](#): > > A German word with a leading ‘V’ that’s pronounced like in English is “validieren/Validierung” (validate/validation). > > ETA: also “Variation” and “Verifikation/verifizieren” Are these loan-words (from English) in German? In which case, is it the English pronunciation being used? j ---
**Author:** ![EinsteinsHund](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/einsteinshund/32/8400_2.png) [@EinsteinsHund](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/EinsteinsHund)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2024, 5:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-german-word-vater-ever-pronounced-with-a-v-sound/1008435/23 "2024-10-06T17:03:13Z")
> [@Treppenwitz](#): > > Are these loan-words (from English) in German? They are loan-words, but not from English but rather from Latin or French, respectively. ---
**Author:** ![EinsteinsHund](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/einsteinshund/32/8400_2.png) [@EinsteinsHund](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/EinsteinsHund)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2024, 5:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-german-word-vater-ever-pronounced-with-a-v-sound/1008435/24 "2024-10-06T17:04:49Z")
nm, double post. ---
**Author:** ![Xocomil](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/xocomil/32/14927_2.png) [@Xocomil](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Xocomil)\ **Post date:** [October 6, 2024, 11:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-german-word-vater-ever-pronounced-with-a-v-sound/1008435/25 "2024-10-06T23:38:52Z")
> [@Ruken](#): > > I don’t get the impression many linguists feel confident about that one. I think Ruken has it right as far as my initial question. The more specific question of was it ever widely and consistently pronounced with a v sound in prestige dialects can be answered with a confident no, I think. > [@EinsteinsHund](#): > > They are loan-words, but not from English but rather from Latin or French, respectively. All the words that are pronounced with a v sound seem to be foreign borrowings. Can you think of any words that are pronounced with an initial v and as far as we know ultimately from a Germanic source? > [@kk\_fusion](#): > > There are a few words with inter-vocalic _v_ though (e.g. _Frevel_) that can be pronounced as both [f] and [v]. [Frevel](https://www.dwds.de/wb/Frevel) is really interesting. It goes from Old High German frevil or fravali to Middle High German vrevel to early modern German frefel to the current spelling. There’s a story there but what it is I don’t know. Hell, there’s probably doctoral dissertation there. Anyone volunteer? > [@Johanna](#): > > Yiddish has a friendliness and charm that German lacks. Kinda the same relationship Afrikaans has to Dutch. ---
**Author:** ![Ruken](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/f475e1/32.png) [@Ruken](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ruken)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2024, 10:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-german-word-vater-ever-pronounced-with-a-v-sound/1008435/26 "2024-10-07T10:21:43Z")
Related, potentially interesting, and very paywalled: [https://www.jstor.org/stable/30160777](https://www.jstor.org/stable/30160777) # The Marking of the F-Sound in German Orthography Gustav Must Monatshefte [Vol. 58, No. 2 (Summer, 1966)](https://www.jstor.org/stable/i30160770), pp. 150-156 ---
**Author:** ![EinsteinsHund](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/einsteinshund/32/8400_2.png) [@EinsteinsHund](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/EinsteinsHund)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2024, 1:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-german-word-vater-ever-pronounced-with-a-v-sound/1008435/27 "2024-10-07T13:30:50Z")
> [@Xocomil](#): > > > [@EinsteinsHund](#): > > > > They are loan-words, but not from English but rather from Latin or French, respectively. > > All the words that are pronounced with a v sound seem to be foreign borrowings. Can you think of any words that are pronounced with an initial v and as far as we know ultimately from a Germanic source? No, I can’t come up with an example of a word with a Germanic root, and I don’t think there are any. ---
**Author:** ![Pardel-Lux](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pardel-lux/32/20182_2.png) [@Pardel-Lux](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pardel-Lux)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2024, 1:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-german-word-vater-ever-pronounced-with-a-v-sound/1008435/28 "2024-10-07T13:45:52Z")
> [@Xocomil](#): > > Can you think of any words that are pronounced with an initial v and as far as we know ultimately from a Germanic source? [Veilchen?](https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/Veilchen) I think the link to _viola_ is remote enough, but this is debatable. And what about the prefix “ver-”, like in verrecken, verrostet, verliebt and verheiratet? Sounds Germanic enough to me. Viel zu Germanic, actually. ---
**Author:** ![EinsteinsHund](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/einsteinshund/32/8400_2.png) [@EinsteinsHund](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/EinsteinsHund)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2024, 1:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-german-word-vater-ever-pronounced-with-a-v-sound/1008435/29 "2024-10-07T13:58:37Z")
> [@Pardel-Lux](#): > > [Veilchen?](https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/Veilchen) I think the link to _viola_ is remote enough, but this is debatable. > And what about the prefix “ver-”, like in verrecken, verrostet, verliebt and verheiratet? Sounds Germanic enough to me. > Viel zu Germanic, actually. But that’s the point, these words with Germanic roots are all pronounced with an ‘f’ sound, unlike the loan-words Variation, Validierung, Verifizierung, Variable, Variante, Vokabel etc. ---
**Author:** ![Pardel-Lux](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pardel-lux/32/20182_2.png) [@Pardel-Lux](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pardel-Lux)\ **Post date:** [October 7, 2024, 2:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-german-word-vater-ever-pronounced-with-a-v-sound/1008435/30 "2024-10-07T14:59:29Z")
Oh, I see. I understood the “v sound” wrong. Logical, really. ---
**Author:** ![Schnitte](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/schnitte/32/9033_2.png) [@Schnitte](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Schnitte)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2024, 9:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-german-word-vater-ever-pronounced-with-a-v-sound/1008435/31 "2024-10-08T21:41:30Z")
My understanding is that the letter W was developed in the Germanic languages for precisely that reason: To denote the pronunciation that’s rendered by V in today’s English. Loan words from Latin and the Romance languages were borrowed later, after the introduction of W, and did not change their spelling even though their pronunciation was that which the letter W was used for. This would explain the observation. ---
**Author:** ![DPRK](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/4491bb/32.png) [@DPRK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DPRK)\ **Post date:** [October 8, 2024, 11:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-german-word-vater-ever-pronounced-with-a-v-sound/1008435/32 "2024-10-08T23:05:05Z")
Classical Latin V (as in vir) underwent a sound change later; you are saying V was already taken in German, so they represented the classical pronunciation (which changed in German too, evidently by the 17th century) by W ? Or did W represent what is written V in Modern English even earlier? ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [October 9, 2024, 3:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-german-word-vater-ever-pronounced-with-a-v-sound/1008435/33 "2024-10-09T03:23:27Z")
Of course ⟨w⟩ was never pronounced [v] in English at any time. The English phoneme /w/ goes clear back to Proto-Indo-European \*w without a break. Just so we’re clear on that. English didn’t get /v/ as a phoneme until Middle English when the French words came in. Old English had a [v] sound, but it was an allophone of /f/ when f fell between two vowels, and was always written ⟨f⟩. This is why English wine has a w, because it was borrowed from Latin vinum before the Norman Conquest. ---
**Author:** ![DPRK](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/4491bb/32.png) [@DPRK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DPRK)\ **Post date:** [October 9, 2024, 4:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-german-word-vater-ever-pronounced-with-a-v-sound/1008435/34 "2024-10-09T04:24:47Z")
That does clear it up; thanks! ---
**Author:** ![dtilque](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/d6d6ee/32.png) [@dtilque](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dtilque)\ **Post date:** [October 9, 2024, 4:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-german-word-vater-ever-pronounced-with-a-v-sound/1008435/35 "2024-10-09T04:27:42Z")
> [@Johanna](#): > > Just so we’re clear on that. English didn’t get /v/ as a phoneme until Middle English when the French words came in. Old English had a [v] sound, but it was an allophone of /f/ when f fell between two vowels, and was always written ⟨f⟩. That explains an observation I made about V recently: it seems to have the most consistent letter-sound correspondence of all the letters. That is, if there’s a letter V in a word, it’s virtually always pronounced /v/. I don’t think there’s even any words with a silent V. And the other way, if there’s a /v/ sound in a word, it almost always spelled with a V. Well, with one major exception which happens to be one of the most common words in the language. ---
**Author:** ![Xocomil](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/xocomil/32/14927_2.png) [@Xocomil](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Xocomil)\ **Post date:** [October 9, 2024, 5:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-german-word-vater-ever-pronounced-with-a-v-sound/1008435/36 "2024-10-09T05:13:13Z")
Thanks, Ruken. One of my local public library systems provides access to JSTOR. I just need to renew my library card. The preview does offer this: > The custom of using different letters to mark the sound /f/ is already found in the very fist German written records known to us, which date from the eighth century. That is quite interesting. > [@EinsteinsHund](#): > > No, I can’t come up with an example of a word with a Germanic root, and I don’t think there are any. That is also quite interesting. > [@Johanna](#): > > it was an allophone of /f/ when f fell between two vowels This is also the case with (some?) words spelled with an intervocalic “v” in modern German (in words with Germanic roots). Based on these things I feel confident that “Vater” is spelled with a “v” not due to a change in pronunciation but rather due to spelling standardization. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-german-word-vater-ever-pronounced-with-a-v-sound/1008435.md?page=1)