Winnebago Aspiration

[Alan H. Hartley]

Koontz John E wrote:

> It occurs to me to wonder if h was regularly elided in any earlier
> American dialects.  In other words, perhaps we are not entirely correct in
> assuming that all early American English speakers could hear an h well.

G. P. Krapp [unfortunate man] says in _The English Language in America_ 
(1925) 2:206 "The records do not indicate that at any time or in any 
region was the the loss of h [h] in words with this sound in the initial 
position, or the addition of h at the beginning of words with initial 
vowels..current in American use." The frequently phonetic spelling of 
"naive" documents would certainly have represented such pronunciations 
had they existed.

Alan