Hypercorrection of /w/-/hw/

[Peter A. McGraw]

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.  I'm a hw- user, but during the period of my life when I was around
horses and horsy people (rural Oregon in the 50s), you made a horse stop by
saying "Ho!" not "Whoa!" I don't know whether this developed from an
earlier [hwo] with the w instead of the h being lost, or whether the [hw-]
form developed (for reasons obscure to me) among people who didn't actually
deal with horses.

Peter Mc.

--On Monday, May 24, 2004 9:39 AM -0700 "Arnold M. Zwicky"
<zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU> wrote:

>  i
> would not be entirely surprised to come across similar uses of hw- in
> the discourse marker "whoa" ("Whoa, dude!").



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