W seems to be a special little letter indeed.
I'm quoting from Wikipedia:
Quote:
In Europe, there are only a few languages that use W in native words and all are located in a central-western European zone between Cornwall and Poland. English, German, Low German, Dutch, Frisian, Welsh, Cornish, Breton, Walloon, Polish, Kashubian, Sorbian and Resian use W in native words. English uses W to represent /w/, German, Polish and Kashubian use it for the voiced labiodental fricative /v/ (with Polish and related Kashubian using Ł for /w/), and Dutch uses it for /w/ or /ʋ/. Unlike its use in other languages, the letter is used in Welsh to represent the vowel /u/ as well as the related approximant consonant /w/. English also contains a number of words beginning with a W that is silent in most dialects before a (pronounced) R, remaining from usage in Anglo-Saxon in which the W was pronounced: wreak, wrap, wreck, wrench, wroth, wrinkle, etc. (Certain dialects of Scottish English still distinguish this digraph.)
In the International Phonetic Alphabet, /w/ is used for the voiced labial-velar approximant, probably based on English.
In the Finnish alphabet, "W" is seen as a variant of "V" and not a separate letter. It is however recognised and maintained in the spelling of some old names, reflecting an earlier German spelling standard, and in some modern loan words. In all cases it is pronounced /v/. In the alphabets of most modern Romance languages (excepting far northern French and Walloon), W is little used, it can be found mostly in foreign names and words recently borrowed (le week-end, il watt, el kiwi). When a spelling for /w/ in a native word is needed, a spelling from the native alphabet, such as V, U, or OU, can be used instead. The same was true in the Danish alphabet and Swedish until 1980 and 2006, respectively, when the letter was officially acknowledged as an individual letter.
The Japanese language uses "W", pronounced /daburu/, as an ideogram meaning "double".
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Zelda I didn't know about the si, thanks! I only knew about si meaning if.
The Turkish alphabet seems to have the same elegance as the Czech, using Ç and Ş for the ch and sh sounds. They also follow vowel harmony, where the suffices of words take a different vowel according to the last vowel of the stem. So the suffix for plural can be either -ler or -lar of example.
Many words are common in Turkish and Greek, and both have borrowed words from the other. We lived together for 400 years after all (
). So sometimes you encounter funny things like tomates and patates. That's the plural for tomatoes and potatoes in Greek, but the singular for tomatoes and potatoes in Turkish. It felt very strange to have to add the -ler to patates when ordering fries.