wh-clusters

[Richard Hogg]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
On 2 Feb 2001, at 16:14, Martin E HULD wrote:

> ----------------------------Original
> message----------------------------

<snip>

But Campbell's view on h-clusters is not universally accepted, thus
both Luick and Kuhn (Language, 1970) speak against him, so too my
own book. See also Dobson for the later language. And of course
most early Scots writers use the trigraph <quh> or something similar
for <wh>, which doesn't help to explain whisky. Personally I blame
the drink.

Richard Hogg

> A second point, a number of texts, eg O'Grady et all. Contemporary
> Linguistics symbolize [hw] as a unit phoneme with IPA inverse-w.
> Historically, this is a poor choice since by the same w-deletion rule
> that governs sword and two, we have an h-pronunciation for who and
> unetymological whore; moreover, the Ayenbit of Inwit consistently
> represents initial PG [f] by <u> (uerste = first) and PG [s] by <z>
> (zalt = salt), but [hw] or [xw] is <hu> (huer = where; huich = which).
>  Therefore, despite Campbell (Old English Grammar p. 20) who takes hw
> (and hl, hr, and hn) as digraphs of voiceless segments, it seems best
> to regard them as clusters at least in Old and Middle English.  I
> think the same is true of New English where whine is parallel to swine
> and twine [hwajn, swajn twajn] in which there is an initial voiceless
> segment which partially devoices the following glide. Additionally,
> treating <why>, presuming you have it in your dialect, as [hwaj] in
> contrast to [waj] (<Y>) is parallel to treating hue [hjuw] versus yew
> [juw] as a case of an initial cluster.
>
> I was wondering if anyone felt as I do that the inverse-w is an
> inappropriate strategy for analyzing the remaining cases of
> phonemically distinct <wh> in American dialects.
>
> Martin E HULD


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Richard Hogg
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