• Lvxferre@mander.xyz
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    7 days ago

    By “the ‘w’ foreigner word” do you mean Wallace, or words with W in general?

    If Wallace: I could’ve rendered his name by sound; in Classical pronunciation Valis [wɐɫɪs] would be really close. But then I’d need to do the same with Brett (Bres?) and Jules (Diules? Ziuls?) and it would be a pain.

    If you mean words with W in general: yup. Long story short ⟨W⟩ wasn’t used in Latin itself; it started out as a digraph, ⟨VV⟩, for Germanic [w] in the Early Middle Ages. Because by then Latin already shifted its own native [w] into [β]→[v], so if you wrote ⟨V⟩ down people would read it wrong.

    • Aqarius@lemmy.world
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      7 days ago

      I mean the Welsh/Waloon/Wallachian/waelsc word for “those people over there” that all the rest of Europe seems to have. It’s not unheard of for neighboring people to call eachother ‘vlach’. I just never noticed Latin doesn’t have it.