Hypercorrection of /w/-/hw/

Peter A. McGraw pmcgraw at LINFIELD.EDU
Tue May 25 17:49:13 UTC 2004


--On Tuesday, May 25, 2004 10:20 AM -0400 "Bethany K. Dumas"
<dumasb at UTKUX.UTCC.UTK.EDU> wrote:

>>> I'm not sure whether this is regional, but I don't recall ever hearing
>>> the original "Whoa!" pronounced that way by people who actually dealt
>>> with horses...
>
>> nor do i (and i used to hang out with lots of people who dealt with
>> horses).  that's why i carefully talked about the discourse marker
>> "whoa", which doesn't necessarily have the same properties as the horse
>> command "whoa":
>>
>> I have often seen the word spelled "woah", generally or always as a
>> discourse marker.
>
> Speaking with my horsey clothes on now, I do not use /hw-/ when saying
> "Whoa! - no matter how fast the horse is going!
>
> Bethany

But do you say "wo" or "ho"?

I understood from the previous discussion that there was a consensus that
the discourse marker is [wo], never [hwo], and this has also been my
observation.  My original message was meant to address the horse command
exclusively, which in my experience is always [ho], not [hwo] (or [wo]).
This being the case, I was wondering aloud where the form [hwo] came from
or whether it still actually exists.

Peter Mc.

*****************************************************************
Peter A. McGraw       Linfield College        McMinnville, Oregon
******************* pmcgraw at linfield.edu ************************



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