The Unruly W - part 1

The letter W is a comparatively new addition to the English language. By the 8th century it was being written, quite literally, as a double u or v. More commonly it was written as the runic letter wynn or wen. Native words using w occur only in Polish, Dutch, German, English and Welsh. In Welsh, however, it represents the vowel u, which probably influenced the early English usage. German, Dutch and Polish usage is primarily as a v, thus Wien (and thence Weiner as an Austrian sausage) was the spelling of old Vienna. This influence led to the Anglicized Sweden for Sverige, etc. One of the many peculiarities this gave rise to was the way many old French words entered the English language with the Normans and subsequent medieval influences and then re-entered from Germanic forms, usually with a local variance in meaning. A good example of this is the early adoption of guard and guarantee with the later adoption of ward and warranty. 'War' illustrates the complexities of derivation in that the French adopted the Germanic 'gewin' which became 'guerre' (it is also the root of 'to win') as the Latin 'bellum was too close to belle or beautiful. Wardrobe comes from the garderobe of Norman times, and so on.
An interesting aside to this is the habit of Dickensian Londoner's to pronounce the letter 'v' as a 'w'; “that's werry nice of you.” But more of that subject anon.