cold wittles--(why w-?)

[Dennis R. Preston]

See Trudgill 1990 (1999) The Dialects of English (Blackwell) for
documentation  of Cockney (as well as eastern Counties) pronunciation
of /v/ as /w/. Admittedly gone now, but surely once there.

dInIs



>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


--
Dennis R. Preston
University Distinguished Professor
Department of Linguistics and Germanic, Slavic,
        Asian and African Languages
Wells Hall A-740
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824-1027 USA
Office: (517) 353-0740
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