cold wittles--(why w-?)

[Dale Coye]

Dickins' work shows a lot of Cockney v/w interchanges.  I haven't got the
sources in front of me, but my memory is that dialect studies later in the
century showed no such confusion and certainly today there is none in cCockney.  The
phoneme in question was probably the voiced bilabial fricative as opposed to
our American /w/ or American labial-dental /v/.  Germans also typically get
these wrong.   I have two German students now who have the bilabial voiced
fricative that they use for any word with w or v in it.  Their phoneme can range
from a fricative to something more similar to our /w/ so teaching them to get
their teeth into the /v/ is crucial, and I assume early 19th c. Cockney was
something similar.
    I also have a theory that this was the OE phoneme spelled "w" too.
Otherwise how could you pronounce all those word that begin with "wr-" like
"writan"?  It must have been a fricative and there was already a /v/ in free
variation with /f/ medially.

Dale Coye
Wilton, NH