Why did "Warsaw" become the standard pronunciation and spelling of the Polish capital in English?

by LotsOfMaps

It seems strange to me, considering almost every other European language pronounces it with a hard V, or as a variant of the Latin Varsovia. Has it always been pronounced with a Germanic w in English, or was this a hypercorrection?

AlsoKnownAsme

I cannot speak specifically to the history of Warsaw, but I feel that some of the answer to your question might be found in the linguistic history of the english letter "w." (Apologies if this is a little too r/linguistics)

"W" was the 24th letter to join the english language (chronologically), before the letters J and V. In Latin, here was no W, instead they used a U (or two) to fulfil the same purpose - and eventually latin shifted to use a B sound where once they used the constanant U.

As the U/W sound died out in Latin, it thrived in Germanic language for long enough to establish a firm footing in Anglo-Saxon Britain, and during the 1500s made it into the alphabet proper. Whilst this was happening, in Northern Europe, the W started to go the same way it had in Latin - slowly it was being replaced with another letter. Unlike Latin, it did not morph into a B, but into another U variant, a letter which didn't enter english print until he 1700s, and even then was still considered to be just a variant of U. V.

The boundaries between U,V and W have been flexible for a long time, and different languages tend to favour them differently.

Linguistics is a complex field, and I am not an expert in it, but I hope this helps you to answer your question. As an interesting final thought: Latin, a language which has as many exceptions as rules, didn't change all of it's UUs to Bs - it made occasional exceptions for place names.

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