Unlikely, as per this page on Hawaiian language, Hawaiian has no D or R consonants. Our most common uu-bearing word — vacuum — also comes from Latin, so I'm not surprised to see another.
In Latin the pair of Us should have a glottal stop between them in both cases: vacu'um and du'umvir. (Now that last one looks like a Tolkien name, and the first could be from Bored of the Rings.) English, having no formal mechanism for indicating a glottal stop, despite using them, lost that gap in "vacuum" somewhere along the way, but kept it in "duumvir".
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2017-11-23 02:01 pm (UTC)In Latin the pair of Us should have a glottal stop between them in both cases: vacu'um and du'umvir. (Now that last one looks like a Tolkien name, and the first could be from Bored of the Rings.) English, having no formal mechanism for indicating a glottal stop, despite using them, lost that gap in "vacuum" somewhere along the way, but kept it in "duumvir".