wh-clusters

[Clodagh Lynam]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Hallo Histlingers

I am a Hiberno-English speaker, born and raised in Dublin.
I have been teaching phonetics at tutorial level since 1987.
In my experience, there are very few Hiberno-English speakers who
do *not* distinguish between 'wh-' and 'w-'.  However, my son, who was
also born and raised in Dublin and is now 16, made no distinction until he
was about 8 or 9 years old - what to make of that??

I am fairly sure that I pronounce 'wh-' as a cluster, with lip-rounding on
the 'h'. Could it be simply that there is variation between speakers - some
having a
cluster and some not? I'm a syntactician, not a phonologist, but is there
not some
way of measuring these things?


----- Original Message -----
From: Larry Trask <larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk>
To: <HISTLING at VM.SC.EDU>
Sent: Sunday, February 04, 2001 11:42 PM
Subject: Re: wh-clusters


> ----------------------------Original message----------------------------
> Martin Huld writes:
>
> >  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.
>
> I've encountered a number of speakers who retain /hw/ -- both
> American and Scottish, with the odd Irish speaker.  I've asked them
> for their intuitions about the status of /hw/, and I've discovered
> that they split about equally into two groups.
>
> One group is certain that /hw/ is a cluster, consisting of /h/
> followed by /w/.  The other group is equally certain that /hw/
> is a single consonant, distinct from all other consonants, and
> not a cluster at all.
>
> Since I belong to the first group, and since the cluster analysis
> is historically correct, I was startled the first time I met
> a member of the second group, but I've met more of them since
> then, and there's no doubt that some people's intuitions are
> quite clear on this point: one consonant, a voiceless [w].
>
>
> Larry Trask
> COGS
> University of Sussex
> Brighton BN1 9QH
> UK
>
> larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk
>
> Tel: 01273-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad)
> Fax: 01273-671320 (from UK); +44-1273-671320 (from abroad)
>