Hypercorrection of /w/-/hw/

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On May 24, 2004, at 10:12 AM, Peter A. McGraw 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
>> would not be entirely surprised to come across similar uses of hw- in
>> the discourse marker "whoa" ("Whoa, dude!").

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)