this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2024
260 points (98.9% liked)

No Stupid Questions

36180 readers
689 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

One of the few things I remember from my French classes in high school was that the letter is called "double V" in that language. Why did English opt for the "U" instead?

You can hear the French pronunciation here if you're unfamiliar with it:

https://www.frenchlearner.com/pronunciation/french-alphabet/

V and W are right next to each other in alphabetical order, which seems to lend further credence to the idea that it should be "Double V" and not "Double U". In fact, the letter U immediately precedes V, so the difference is highlighted in real-time as you go through the alphabet:

  • ...
  • U
  • V
  • W
  • X
  • Y
  • Z

It's obviously not at all important in the grand scheme of things, but I'm just curious why we went the way we did!

Cheers!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] palordrolap@fedia.io 54 points 2 months ago (1 children)

You know how the Romans wrote U? V.

Like J is a variant of I, U is a variant of V. Julius Caesar would have written his name IVLIVS

In some languages, especially English, the shapes were used interchangeably until well after the invention of the printing press. There are old, modern English dictionaries in existence where you'll find words with "i" and "j" sorted in the "wrong" order or intermixed, and likewise for "u" and "v" for precisely this reason.

The letter w was born during that mixed up time, and so it got the double-u name, despite the fact that the shape doesn't seem to match any more.

(For more fun, look up the letter wynn, "Ƿ" which if it had survived into Middle English, might be what we'd be using instead.)

[–] PapstJL4U@lemmy.world 20 points 2 months ago (1 children)

An example of the u|v mixup people can look at the Slovenian language.

They have the v where other languages have a u, but they say it like a u.

example: automobile vs avtomobil

[–] gregor@gregtech.eu 8 points 2 months ago

The 2nd Slovenian in this thread, stuff is getting interesting.