Is 'w' a useless letter?

[timtheenchanter]

Salutations, speakers of the English language!

I was looking at a Soviet propaganda poster the other day that depicted the overblown violence, corruption, depravity, and other pleasant things that apparently happen all the time in New York City. Though the poster was quite amusing, in my opinion, I was intrigued by how "Wall Street" was spelled using Cyrillic letters:

"Uall Street"

Russian has no 'w' letter, so they used a 'u' to make that sound. And when you say it out loud, the 'ua' automatically make a 'w' sound.

That got me thinking... Is the letter 'w' even necessary in the English language? I thought of several words with 'w's' in them, and I can't seem to find any that absolutely require that letter. Here are some examples:

water - uater
Walter - Ualter
bowsprit - boughsprit
will - uill
dew - doo

So, what do you think? Do you think the English language can do perfectly well without a 'w' from a phonetic point of view? I'm curious.

Tim the Enchanter

[mousemaylikecheese]

(OT grammar ambiguity (although I cannae think of a better way to phrase it, either (perhaps "though I found the poster quite amusing, I was intrigued...")): Did you believe that the poster was amusing, or that you were intrigued by the spelling of Wall Street?)

I suppose it could be removed, but I like the letter w. Also, I'm not sure that uahistle or uahiskey or uaord would catch on.

"Uaillium De Uaorde uarites (now, that looks wrong (another word--uirong(?!) Why did I switch to ui's? From "uaillium"? "uarong"(?))) for the Ankh Morpork Times" (And further more, it looks as if I'm calling him Vallium.)

I would veto the idea of removing W from the English language, were I asked to sign a definite agreement.

silly note: I am putting the full blame for my ridiculous addiction to parentheses on Voldershmookins.

[timtheenchanter]

I'm not suggesting that 'w' should be removed, I'm just thinking it can. I too would veto such a motion, but that doesn't stop me from thinking of ways to streamline the English alphabet!

I think another somewhat useless letter is 'c', since it can make either a 'k' or an 's' sound. So why not just use either of those two letters instead? The only sound that absolutely requires a 'c' would be the 'ch' sound, but that's its only thing 'c' is useful for in my opinion.

Tim the Enchanter

[mousemaylikecheese]

Well, I do suppose that our American spellings are somewhat streamlined, already, where we omit a "u" in honour (although I do rather like the other spelling).

Have you ever seen that joke about how making certain eliminations or combinations in order to make English easier to spell would turn it into (pseudo)"German"? (And ve vould all be speaking German like zey vanted in ze first place) ;D

Also, while we're on this linguistics train of thought, irrespective of its meaning, what do you think of the phrase

"cellar door"?

[Ankh]

It wouldn't be ua in front of it, just u.
With words like write or wrong, the w can be eliminated.

The thing is, though, no writing system is perfect. They all have their flaws.
The Japanese language, for example, uses three different groups of characters: Kanji, which are basically Characters from Chinese; hiragana, which are syllabic characters; and katakana, another syllabic group that works like hiragana and is used for foreign words and emphasis. On top of that, kanji often have more than one reading, depending on the context.
Also, consonants are always followed by a vowel sound with the exception of the n sound. This makes it a bit odd when you try to write words from English in Japan. (Japan borrows a lot of words from English)
France- フランス (furansu)
The Beatles - ビートルズ (bītoruzu)
I've decided to stop now, before I get use even more off topic. My point is, we could be a lot worse off with the English alphabet. At least we only have to use one!

((Note: Japanese is a pain to learn, but I like the challenge.)

[bb]

Let's see.

Can we use W to impale llamas?
Can we use use W as a sandwich?
Can we use W to make a make-shift computer to check Facebook if you suddenly end up on the roads, destitute?

If you answered yes to one or more of these questions, then W is definitely not useless. However, if you replied to all those questions in the negative... DESTROY W!

[mousemaylikecheese]

A: How is impaling llamas productive or vaguely useful? Nor is impaling lamas something I'd promote.
B: You cannot make a sandwich out of the perfectly good letter H or M for example, nor can we use "use w" to make a sandwich.
C: Firstly, I don't feel that Facebook is necessary, secondly, there are plenty of other varied things, such as the book Les Miserables, a chunk of wood, string, a pair of scissors, a knife, or a glass of water that cannot be utilized to make a computer (unless perhaps we're talking about Hex, in which case Facebook doesn't exist) and thirdly, well, thirdly, Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! and fourthly, letters are not material things that function in electronic circuits.


*headdesk* Thank you, Ankh, for pointing out that I was using "ua" where it wasn't strictly necessary.