The joke version.
“Is it pronounced Hawai’i or Havai’i?”
“Havai’i.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re velcome.”
Are these loan-words (from English) in German? In which case, is it the English pronunciation being used?
j
They are loan-words, but not from English but rather from Latin or French, respectively.
nm, double post.
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.
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?
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?
Kinda the same relationship Afrikaans has to Dutch.
Related, potentially interesting, and very paywalled:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/30160777
The Marking of the F-Sound in German Orthography
Gustav Must
Monatshefte
Vol. 58, No. 2 (Summer, 1966), pp. 150-156
No, I can’t come up with an example of a word with a Germanic root, and I don’t think there are any.
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.
Oh, I see. I understood the “v sound” wrong. Logical, really.
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.
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?
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.
That does clear it up; thanks!
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.
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.
That is also quite interesting.
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.