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English’s voiceless "wh" (hw?) | ||
Tags: Pronunciation | English | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages |  | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6705 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes  Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 9 of 28 10 November 2011 at 9:40am | IP Logged | ||
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I'm not an expert on English (and Germanic) language history, but historically 'wh-' must have come from something like /kw/ because the parallel words in the Nordic languages did - I know that. Actually New Norwegian still writes kv- ("kva" = 'what'), and without being specific I have heard many Norwegians pronounce the /kw/ sound. In some Danish dialects (like 'himmerlandsk') we have the same situation, although with a h-sound before the /w/. In Icelandic 'who' is "kver" and "why" is "af hverju".
Anglosaxon also had "hw": the nominative for 'who' was "hwā" (masc,fem), and 'what' was "hwæt". So the big question is more why there is a "wh-" now. In spite of differing pronunciations in most varieties of Modern English (/h/ in "who" and /w/ in "why") this common spelling must have some background in Middle English. It is possible that some dialects have preserved an old Germanic sound, just as the Nordic languages to some extent have done, or it could be a later development, I don't know. However I don't have the impression that the audiable /h/ is common among native speakers of English. Edited by Iversen on 10 November 2011 at 9:46am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6013 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 10 of 28 10 November 2011 at 10:57am | IP Logged | ||
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I've seen quh in older Scots manuscripts -- eg in this extract from The Brus we have words like quhat and quhen.
Everything I've seen written on Anglo-Saxon uses "hw", which suggests to me that the Scots QUH comes from a K sound introduced by the vikings to Northumbria during the Danelaw. So it would seem likely that Anglo-Saxon came to the British Isles with a soft HW/WH to start off with. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Leipzig Hexaglot Newbie Wales Joined 4805 days ago 22 posts - 33 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchC2, Lowland Scots, SpanishC2, Portuguese, Catalan Studies: Welsh, Tok Pisin, German, Italian | Message 11 of 28 12 November 2011 at 3:55pm | IP Logged | ||
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I nearly always pronounced 'wh' as /ʍ/, despite it not being the norm usually in my
variety of the language - I inherited it from my Irish grandparents. It's a shame that it's dying out, as I find it a lovely sound. What I find interesting, though, is those dialects in which 'wh' is pronounced as /f/ rather than /w/. I wonder if it is because of these accents that Maori's f sound as wh? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6013 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 12 of 28 12 November 2011 at 8:46pm | IP Logged | ||
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The /f/ thing is almost definitely caused by a rapid change from Gaelic to English or Scots. There is no equivalent to WH in either Irish Gaelic or Scottish Gaelic, and W-like sounds aren't found at the start of words in quite a lot of dialects.
I'm guessing the Maori orthography is more influenced by [f]'s allophone [ɸ], which sounds a bit like the first half of a WH sound. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4951 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 13 of 28 12 November 2011 at 8:51pm | IP Logged | ||
Well, there's one more speaker here that is using this sound now. I figured, that there are really so few words that use the sound, and except for high frequency "what, which, when, where" and maybe "wheel, white, whale", the rest are lower frequency words ("whether, whisper, wheat, etc...). So it won't change much if at all my way of speaking. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6705 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 14 of 28 13 November 2011 at 4:39am | IP Logged | ||
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I have studied Politikens etymological dictionary since my last post in this thread, and there it is unequivocally stated that the Nordic kv-or hv-sound goes back to a common Germanic sound. This raises the question why not only English, but also German has lost the extra little whiff of air before the preserved /w/ resp. /v/-sound.
So I grabbed my old Duden's etymological dictionary which stated that for instance "wer" was "wer, wag" in Mittelhochdeutsch, but "[h]wer, [h]wag" in Althochdeutsch - i.e. a chronology that isn't to far from the English one. So the original Anglosaxon /hw/ as in "hwa" (=who) or "hwæt" wasn't inspired by the language of the vikings of the 8-11. century - it came long before with the Angles, Saxons and Jutes under Hengist and Horsa who according to the venerable Bede came to England somewhere in the 5. century at the instigation of king Vortigern to help him in a minor quarrel against another local king. Ye guardians of that old sound should treat it as a valuable treasure salvaged from the days of yore. Edited by Iversen on 13 November 2011 at 4:47am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6013 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 15 of 28 13 November 2011 at 10:37am | IP Logged | ||
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It's quite interesting that the WH is preserved where the vikings seemingly reintroduced the lost /k/ though -- it's as though the Northumbrian speakers repeated the process that had previously occured on the continental mainland.
(And we shouldn't really put too much credibility on Bede, cos he basically wrote down a pile of folklore and called it history. Always cross-reference Bede with archaelogical and placename evidence.) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4846 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian | Message 16 of 28 13 November 2011 at 3:00pm | IP Logged | ||
Just a little correction. Of course, "who" in Icelandic is "hver" and it is only pronounced [kver]. But regardless from this, this is an interesting discussion about a phenomenon that I was not aware of. I didn't know that there are dialects of English which preserved this archaic sound and that it seems to have been a common Germanic feature. Very interesting, indeed! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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