w is such a badly named letter, why did we have to get rid of ƿ
@Felthry In English it really is.
(But then in Dutch both names I know for "y" translates to "Greek {ij/ei}"
@BatElite it's the same sound as v is in english, right?
@Felthry I It's not quite the same I think, but close? I *think* v is the same across Dutch and English.
@BatElite I know that w in German is the same sound as v in english, and I had thought that german and dutch shared that bit of orthography but perhaps not!
@Felthry TBH I only spent an inordinate amount of time privately thinking about the differences in w between English and Dutch, I might not know German pronunciation well enough to compare. ^^;
@BatElite we mostly know the German one because there are a lot of German names that come up in physics and mathematics, many of which start with w
@Felthry (I'm going to have to drop out of this conversation I think, for now. ^^;)
@BatElite that's fine!
@BatElite also i'll happily help with IPA stuff! it's really neat and useful and not as complicated as it looks
@BatElite also what you refer to with a sort of h sound might actually be a dialectal difference? our dialect (southern american english) still has a distinction between the words "whine" and "wine", but the majority of english dialects no longer do
@Felthry I mean like, *before* you properly make the w sound. It's maybe hard to explain. :<
@BatElite It is more before than after; the sound at the beginning of the word "whine" is transcribed as /hw/ even though it's written after.
@Felthry spelled out it's "wee", which is pronounced as "way" in English except that we use a different sound for w. (using whatever linguistics-speak is for "upper teeth against lower lip" rather than the sort of modified o from English. It basically gets rid of a sort of h sounds that you get with an "English" w)
You probably know that part better than I do though. ^^;
(I looked at IPA earlier today and it looks awfully difficult help.)