Hypercorrection of /w/-/hw/

[Douglas Bigham]

In a message dated 5/24/2004 11:39:45 AM Central Standard Time,
zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU writes:
your explanation in terms of contrast maintenance strikes me as very
dubious, however.  many historical hw- words have minimal-pair w-
counterparts ("which"/"witch", "whales"/"Wales", "why"/"Y") but don't
have the hw- maintained; many other neutralizations have proceeded
merrily on their way even when they result in significant ambiguities
("pen"/"pin", "Dawn"/"Don"); and anyway in the case of "when" and
"where" the chances for ambiguity in context are vanishingly small
Right.  I should have been clearer.  I don't think I would call this
constrast *maintenance* at all.  The win/when where/were distinctions popped out at me
from the pronunciations of a word-list I had people read for vowels.  That's
partly why it surprised me... I thought my /hw/ was totally affected, and here
it was, all throughout my family, doing 'distinction work' INSTEAD of the
vowels (which is a whole nother story).

>>>by the way, i'm pretty sure i've heard emphatic hw- in "what" (especially
in the one-word incredulity question "What?!") from speakers who otherwise
have no hw-/w- distinction.<<<

Yes... but with a fronter (or at least less reduced) vowel, right?  Most
people I know have this.  I have some little tickling in my brain that this comes
from a movie... "Wayne's World" maybe?


-dsb
Douglas S. Bigham
Department of Linguistics
University of Texas - Austin
http://hometown.aol.com/capn002/myhomepage/index.html