My Dinky Note

English uses the Latin alphabet of the Romans. However, this had no letter suitable for representing the phoneme /w/ which was used in Old English, though phonetically the sound represented by /v/ was quite close. In the 7th century scribes wrote uu for /w/; later they used the runic symbols known as wynn. European scribes had continued to write uu, and this usage returned to England with the Norman Conquest in 1066. Early printers sometimes used vv for lack of a w in their type. The name double-u recalls the former identity of u and v, which is also evident in a number of cognate words (flour/flower, guard/ward, suede/Swede, etc.). (source: http://www.askoxford.com/)

The earliest form of the letter W was a doubled V used in the 7th century by the earliest writers of Old English; it is from this <uu> digraph that the modern name “double U” comes. This digraph was not extensively used, as its sound was usually represented instead by the runic wynn (Ƿ), but W gained popularity after the Norman Conquest, and by 1300 it had taken wynn’s place in common use. Other forms of the letter were a pair of Vs whose branches cross in the middle. An obsolete, cursive form found in the nineteenth century in both English and German was in the form of an “n” whose rightmost branch curved around as in a cursive “v” (compare the shape of ƕ). (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/)

In the IPA vowels chart, we also can see both semivowel y and w. Phoneme y is a rounded front close vowel, while phoneme w which represented as an inverted-m is a unrounded back close vowel.

At first, I didn’t know what symbol represents phoneme w in the IPA vowels or consonants chart. However, after I read several information (history) about why grapheme w is pronounced ‘double u’, I’m quite sure that the inverted-m symbol in IPA vowels chart represents phoneme w.