'wh' words

[Debra.Ziegeler]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Larry Trask writes:

When I was a kid, absolutely everybody pronounced the /hw/ in words
like 'white' and 'why', and so I learned to do this too.  Years later,
my mother noticed that my younger brothers were omitting the /h/ in
these words, and she condemned this new style as "sloppy".  But now
I've been joined at Sussex by a younger American colleague, and she
tells me that she considers the use of /hw/ to be "pretentious".

I think I could cope with a slightly more stately pace of linguistic
change.

- It's interesting to observe how normal processes of linguistic
change are given value-laden terms by the society in which the
changes take place. My 75-year-old aunt in Australia, who voluntarily
submitted herself to a course in elocution at an early age,
invariably pronounces words like 'white' with the /hw/ initial. She
is the only Australian I have heard to do this, though I do
remember primary school teachers trying unsuccessfully to impress
this pronunciation on our young minds in my first years at school.
Years later, I observe that speakers of Mandarin Chinese whose first
languages are Cantonese or Hokkien sometimes pronounce the /hw/  in
words such as 'huai' ('spoilt, bad') as /w/, and am reminded by a
Taiwanese colleague, Lien Chinfa,  that once the /hw/ was there in
English too. No way to stop change.

Debra Ziegeler