Why Don’t We Pronounce the W in Two?

Hi there, you have A Way with Words.

Hi there, this is Shona. I’m calling from San Diego.

Oh, great. Well, what can we do for you?

So I know that the English language has a lot of anomalies, but I was trying to understand why the number two is pronounced T-O-O and doesn’t have that wah sound, whereas almost every other word in the English language that has a T and a W, like twang or tweed, you hear the W.

Oh, interesting. How did you get to thinking about this?

So I’ve studied a few languages. I speak Spanish, Hungarian, and Dutch. And I was speaking with my cousin who’s living in Israel right now. He’s studying Hebrew. So we were sort of talking back and forth about all the weird things about the English language because it must be so hard to learn as a foreigner.

Oh, my gosh.

Can you imagine?

Yes, absolutely.

Yeah, and you got to think about the two.

Yeah, so the numbers in English are some of the oldest words, and they really have some artifacts in them, don’t they? They’re these little archaeological projects when you get to looking at them really closely.

So two, T-W-O is a weird one.

You’re right. It’s got that W. What is the W doing there? Any ideas?

We did not come up with any ideas. We just thought, why isn’t it pronounced tos, or why isn’t there a second way to say the number two?

Okay.

So as somebody who speaks a bunch of languages, one thing you know about English already is that English has got weird spelling. The spelling and the pronunciation don’t match very well for a lot of words, right?

Right.

Okay.

So what happened was our spelling didn’t change nearly as fast as our pronunciation. And that’s one of the things with two. So it used to be that two was spelled T-W-A, like that. And the spelling and the pronunciation changed over time.

But when we have that W sound, the wah-wah-wah, and it’s followed by certain vowel sounds, sometimes that W sound collapses into the vowel. It’s just a mechanical thing that’s easier for mouths to do, even for careful, educated speakers.

So it also happened with WHO, with who? Where did that W go? We don’t say that W anymore, right? So that’s why the W sound disappeared, even though the W letter is still in the spelling.

And so we also had something else happen in English, which was the great vowel shift, where a lot of vowels just moved around in the whole palette that has changed, and a lot of vowels moved, and here we are. I don’t want to get into the great vowel shift and explain that at length, but just know that at some point over several hundred years, vowels moved in English substantially.

You can Google great vowel shift and find out more.

But in any case, the other thing that you should know about too is that W isn’t really useful to say. It’s not useful for the pronunciation, but it gives us an incredible etymological clue. It is a phenomenal clue when it comes to finding out about the roots of English because it shows us that the number two is related to all of the Indo-European languages. It is related to dozens and dozens of languages.

So it is related to zwei, which means two in German, and duo, which means two in Latin, and again, dozens and dozens of other languages, all descended from an original word and a long-lost language that meant two.

Huh.

Yeah.

Wow.

And so it’s part of, so this one word, two, this three letters, is part of this small set of words that prove that English is related to this long-lost language that most of the European languages and many of the Indo-European languages are descended from. It’s pretty cool.

Fascinating.

Thank you so much. I’m definitely going to Google the great vowel shift.

Well, thank you so much for answering my question. I love your show. It’s the best for us linguist nerds.

Yeah, our pleasure. Thank you so much for your call. Call us again sometime.

Okay, I will. Thank you both so much. It’s such an honor to be on the show.

Bye-bye.

Okay, bye.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

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