Coming up on Word Matters, Linguistic Double Dipping.
I'm Emily Brewster and Word Matters is produced by Merriam-Webster in collaboration with New England Public Media.
On each episode, Merriam-Webster editors Amin Shea,
Peter Sakalowski and I explore some aspect of the English language from the dictionary's vantage point.
English borrowed lots of words from French.
And it liked some of those words so much, it borrowed them twice.
Peter explains.
One thing that's unusual about French dictionaries,
French monolingual dictionaries, is if you turn to the letter W,
you realize that there are no French words that begin with W. You will see
if you have a good-sized French dictionary,
like a petit Robert or petit La Rousse, which is the size of our collegiate dictionary.
There might be 20 or 30 words and you realize they're all English or German words that have been borrowed into French,
but none of them are natively French words.
It's just one of those things.
It's a language that can obviously make that sound.
They have the word we that is spelled with an O, but for whatever reason,
because most of French is derived from Latin and Latin didn't have a W.
as you can think of the old inscriptions where U's would appear as V's,
for example.