And why is the W silent anyways?
The ⟨W⟩ is silent now, but it wasn’t until 1500 or so. Back then the word was pronounced /two:/; it would almost rhyme with contemporary “toe”. But then that /o:/ became /u:/ (the modern pronunciation), due to the Great Vowel Shift, and since /w/ and /u/ are really similar they fused together.
@[email protected] mentioned that in a few associated words that ⟨W⟩ letter still represents an actual /w/ phoneme, note how the following vowel is different - that blocked the “fusion”.
Curiously in words related to ‘two’ the W is often pronounced!
Twin, Twixt, Between, Twelve etc
Oh. My. God. I am so disappointed in myself that I never realized these words were all related before. Thank you for this gift.
A few less-obvious associations, just for fun:
- Just like “the house” /s/ is “to house” /z/, “the glass” /s/ is “to glaze” /z/
- Tiw’s Day, Wotan’s Day, Thor’s Day, Frigg’s Day. Note: Tiw, Wotan and Frigg are the native names for Norse Tyr, Odin and Freyja.
- “Flee”, “fly”, “flow” are all related.
- The “mus” in “muscle” is a borrowed cognate to native “mouse”.
By the argument, is the w in “two” actually silent? What would it sounds like when pronounced? I think it would sound like “two” already does.
It would sound like “twu” as in “twu wuv”
Mawwiage!
Lol.
OK, Impressive Clergyman!
I don’t necessarily think so. If the W was pronounced, I think it would sound something more like ‘tawoo’ or ‘teewoo’
twoah
hawk twoah
Spell out that thang!
Side question?
Does twelve basically mean two eleven?
Twelve’s root is in meaning “two left”. And similarly eleven’s origin is meaning “one left”. In both cases left over from ten, the base unit of counting.
Interesting. This sorta makes sense actually.
Curious though, do you have a reference link?
Twain.
“He split Robin’s arrow in twain!”
The last time I was with a woman it was actually twoo, it was quite magical, I tell ya.
Tuwu, what’s this?
UwU
So, basically the owl from the tootsie roll commercials.
One…ah-ToWHO…three!
crunch
I’m going to just drop this here (be sure to watch to the end):
The W isn’t silent, it has a decoy hiding it. The real W is after the o.
You do realize the ?si shit is your private YT token right?
Interesting. Do you have any more info on the SourceID token and how it can compromise an account?
Okay, unless you want to taunt someone into trying to hijack your Google account or track your info, you should edit your comment link to remove the ? and everything after that.
Wait until you learn about words starting with a silent p, like pterodactyl and ptoilet.
ptoilet?
That’s gonna phuck with my sychology!
Without the silent W, it’s just “to”, which sounds exactly the same as “two”
I probably didn’t title my post properly. My bad, seems most people got my point.
