Vesuvius

zarkanian@sh.itjust.works to Memes@sopuli.xyz – 424 points –
33

Yep

Mawwiage.

Mawwiage is wat bwings us togevaaah, today.

Mawwiage. Vfat bwessed awaaaingement, vfat dweam wifin a dweeam…

How else would it be pronounced, how is the anglicised pronunciation?

(Serious question by a non native speaker)

"Anglicized" is probably not the best way to think about it. The Latin letter "v" was pronounced "w" through the classical period, but had shifted to β or v (fricative) by the third century, long before English existed. V was pronounced v (voiced labiodental fricative) for many centuries. And though we do tend to give the classical period a lot of prestige, it was just one phase for Latin.

Funny part is, the same shift happened in a lot of languages. I think some more obvious examples are modern German and Polish, where letter W corresponds to the V sound. Although I believe that the shift happened in German and then Polish borrowed the letter with the new pronunciation.

Thanks so much for pointing this out. As a native German speaker I still had no idea what's going on until this comment made me question what a W sounds like in other languages. It's literally a double-U in English, how come I never stumbled upon that.

in swedish i think we've just gone from "fv" to "v", somehow

very common example since it's in old surnames: hufvud > huvud

I work in IT and had a dude use the UwU accent with me on a call today while I was trying to fix his email. Made me wanna barf.

How did you know that he was doing it on purpose? Some people talk that way naturally.

Because the call started off with him talking normally. I've spoken to him a bunch before today.