The letter "W" in spanish alphabet is really uncommon
Why is it that the letter "W" is really uncommon?. I Think it is only used for foreign words as I haven't yet seen a word containing it.
walkie-talkie
whiskey
web
6 Answers
The sound /w/ was rarely used in Latin and could not be represented with a single letter (only in dipthongs) either, but since Old German used that sound often and without dipthongs, they joined two U into a single letter around the 7th century, and old English borrowed to replaced its own runic wynn symbol. This sound only appears in Spanish in the sequences "ua", "ue", "ui" and "uo", but we don't have that sound in sequences like "wr", so we never needed that symbol. Remember that Spanish is modern Latin, not a Germanic language. For this reason, all words with W are foreign ones.
The sound of "web" can actually be achieved in Spanish writing "ueb" (although in English the /e/ sound is a little bit more open), because there is a dipthong, but "wrong" cannot be spelled without the W in Spanish, although it is not necessary, because the sound "wr" does not appear in Spanish words.
The K is a Greek letter, while the rest of our alphabet is Latin. Romans used the C to transliterate the K in most words, so Spanish never really required this letter at all. Some Celtics languages liked the K more than the C, and other Germanic languages imitated them, while we continued using our normal Latin alphabet.
Germans invented the W because they needed an extra letter, and we invented the Ñ for the same reason.
The H is not pronounced in any Romance languages (Spanish, French, Italian...) for native words. Latin used the H for a weak aspiration, different from the Germanic H, which began to disappear. By the first century C.E., Roman poets and teachers were struggling to get people to pronounce "correctly" the H in words. The aspiration remained alive, more or less, until the 12 century, and a little bit longer in the south of Spain.
The digraph CH was used by the Romans to transliterate a Greek words with the K sound in the word "kiss", which is why English pronounces "chemistry" as "kemistry" and not like in church. The French used this symbol for the sound "sh", which is why "chasis" sounds like "shasi" instead of the sound in "church". The Germans use it to represent the strong gutural sound of "Hoch". The Spaniards used it to represent the sound "tsh", which is the one of "church", because this sound did not exist in Latin or Greek, so they needed a letter to represent it. Old English used to write words with the "church" sound simply with a C, but they adopted the French spelling, and then they extended it to words like "church", probably imitating the Spaniards (I guess).
The word schedule comes from Greek schida (splinter), throguh Late Latin schedula (paper strip), and of course, French. It was introduced relatively recently in English, and Webster in USA decided to use the pronunciation closer to the original Greek, while the Britons decided to go for the French one.
¡Uau! Why would you need W when you can spell that sound perfectly without it?
I would like to throw a quick fact out here that follows Lazarus' statement, hopefully you find it interesting as in, especially after reading what Lazarus wrote. In Spanish and English, think about what you're really saying when you say, "W". You're saying "double u" or in Spanish "doble u" which you can commonly here with the Platinum selling Reggaeton group Wisin y Yandel. They will often say their initials for short in the songs, "doble U y griega". 
I think that when Spain found out that /w/ is not in the Latin alphabet Spain just decided to follow along. bekah595
While we're on the subject, anyone have the story on why Spanish treats the letter "h" as silent, I believe when it stands on its own? 
When paired with the letter "c" for example, it appears to create a distinct sound...elsewhere, it keeps quiet!
Same with "k".
