pajautā! - Jautājums par burtu W angļu alfabētā

The origin of the written letter in English is really 'double U': the 'W' sound of Classical Latin was represented by either 'U' or 'V' (so Caesar's 'veni, vidi, vici' was pronounced 'weni widi wici'), but in Mediaeval Latin the sound had become a 'V'. Both letters v and u were therefore ambiguous, and the sound was in Early English written as 'uu', or by the Runic symbol known as wyn. By the 14th century the modern ligatured form had become standard. The sound existed in early Greek, represented by the 'digamma' (so called from its F shape, which looks rather like a double gamma), and was still spoken in Homeric Greek (as may be determined from the lack of elision in phrases like eni oikoi, 'in the house', at Iliad 1.30, where eni is not elided because oikos was pronounced 'woikos'). It did not exist in Attic Greek as a consonant.
Its phonetic description would be as a semi-vowel (vowel-like sound, consonant-like function), which is labio-velar (sound produced by the back of the tongue against the soft palate, with lip rounding).

English initial 'wh' was written 'hw' (which more accurately represents the sound) until the late 13th century. It is particularly associated with interrogative words (when, where, what, why, who). The sound may be described as an unvoiced version of 'w' (because the velar sound is preceded by a silent breath), but it is now sometimes pronounced as 'w', without the initial breath: 'which' and 'witch' sound identical in the British RP accent. It has an etymological connection with 'qu', which begins some Latin interrogatives (quis 'who', qui 'why'). In early Germanic the 'kw' sound had mutated through 'chw' to 'hw'. In Middle English 'when' and 'what' could be spelt as 'quan' and 'quat'; and conversely 'quick' and 'quite' were in some dialects written as 'whik' and 'white'.

Initial 'wh' followed by the vowel 'O' has a related origin. 'Who, whole, whore' are derived from earlier 'qu' words, and the digraph is pronounced as 'H', which was their original English spelling. They were not spelt with a 'w' until the 15th century.

Such processes of phonetic change were first mapped by the 19th century philologists as 'sound laws'. The point about a change like 'qu' to 'chw' to 'hw' is that the sounds are all articulated in the same way, but with progressively less contact between the tongue and the velum: one might describe it as a kind of systematic muscular laziness (or efficiency, if a less negative word is preferred). This particular change shows a stopped sound becoming a fricative, and then an aspirate, mapped as part of a more general sound movement in 'Grimm's Law', formulated in 1822 by Jakob Grimm (better known for Grimm's Fairy Tales).

The digamma as a written character has a history which diverges completely from its original expression of the 'w' sound, because the Romans used it to represent labiodental 'F', as in Modern English. When they adapted the Greek alphabet, they used 'u' or 'v' to represent the semi-vowel as well as the vowel 'u', so the digamma appears to have been a spare character available for 'F', which was not pronounced in Classical Greek (but that is another story...).