Will double-u disappear?
I was enjoying my holidays in Ireland and I was listening to the radio. The woman referred to a website on the internet. There was something that struck me. She didn't say 'double-u double-u double-u', but used 'whewhewhe' instead, with the vowel like in the, the sound linguists refer to as schwa. (To write it down phonetically, it would become [wәwәwә].)
I think the schwa in the pronunciation of the letter w will become the regular letter that's used for abbreviations and for the spelling of words (but the latter will just be a result of its use for the former). For abbreviations it's quite obvious that we don't want to pronounce the w as double-u, for it is the only letter who has three syllables (there are even no with two, the most 'difficult' are actually h and y, I think).One of the mere reasons it is likely one would not like to use 'double-u' is because it results in hardly or not abbreviated abbreviations. Why should we say 'double-u double-u double-u' with its nine syllables when we could just use 'world wide web' with three instead? I think there are hardly any w's in abbreviations that replace words with three or more syllables.
Of course this solution brings a problem. It's not impossible, but I'm not really charmed by the idea to just pronounce the complete words instead of a letter. 'WorldHO' for the World Health Organization does sound weird. To make it a 'real' abbreviation, I think wә would fit.
4 Comments:
Happy birthday!
Happy birthday Geert.
I think that it is better to use the clasic use of double-u double-u double-u dot then making an 'real' abbreviation.
What about subdomains.
Sorry for this double comment, but I would like to ask for your e-mail so I can e-mail you.
That's codswallop [at] gmail [dot] com.
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