Talk:Pronunciation of English ⟨wh⟩

Other Germanic languages

It might be interesting to look at the history of this cluster in other Germanic languages. Here's what I know, or think I know, anyhow:

• German - merged with /v/ (in all dialects?)
• Dutch - same as in German?
• Swedish - merged with /v/
• Danish - merged with /v/ in most dialects, retained (as [hw]) in Northern-Jutland (and now dying?)
• Icelandic - merged with /kv/ in most dialects, retained (as [x^w]) in one dialect. Now dying, despite having been a bit of a prestige dialect in some contexts.
• Faroese - merged with /kv/ in all dialects
• Norwegian - merged with /kv/ in some dialects, merged with /v/ in other dialects

Looks like this cluster got into trouble everywhere. Haukur (talk) 22:51, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

Oldest pronunciation

“The pronunciation of this digraph as /ʍ/ is historically the oldest” I'm slightly in doubt, because as far as I know, ‘wh’ (or old ‘hw’ respectively) derives from PIE *k^w, shifted to *x^w and later to h^w/hw. Maybe contemporary /hw/ is a re-invention? --FAeR (talk) 03:11, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

Why would it be a re-invention? Contemporary /hw/ is an uninterrupted continuation of Old English /hw/. In the dialects of Scots where /hw/ turned to /kw/ (reflected in spellings like quhat for what), you could say it's a "re-invention" of the pre-Grimm's Law PIE /k^w/. —Angr 04:08, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

Phonemicity

[excerpts from discussion at Wikipedia talk:IPA for English.]

Speaking as someone who uses /hw/ natively and non-self-consciously, I must say (1) I have always intuitively felt it to be a consonant cluster, /h/ + /w/, not a single consonant, and (2) in my accent at least, it's a voiceless approximant, not a fricative, so if anything we should be transcribing it /w̥/, not /ʍ/. And speaking as a linguist with a fair amount of experience in the field of English dialectology, I must say I've never seen /ʍ/ proposed as a phoneme of English (as opposed to the surface realization of /hw/) anywhere but Wikipedia. Saying "I always thought using the symbol 'ʍ' was dumb" may not have been a particularly strong argument, but there are reasons behind it. —Angr 07:33, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

A fact which always astonished my linguistics teachers, who thought I did it as an affectation.

(edit conflict) The phonetic distinction between [w] and [ʍ] is voicing, and it highlights an additional phoneme rather than a phonologically irregular cluster. At a phonemic (broad) level it's more accurate. Given the triviality of a minimal phonetic difference between /hw/ and /ʍ/, shouldn't we defer to the phonemic level?Synchronism (talk) 07:51, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

The phonetic distinction between the two is not only voicing, as [ʍ] is described as a fricative, and I don't see (1) why you consider /hw/ to be "phonologically irregular", or (2) why you consider /ʍ/ phonemically more accurate than /hw/. Considering [w̥] has the exact same distribution restrictions as [h] (occurring only word-initially or stressed-syllable-initially), I'd say it's more phonologically economical to treat it as an h-cluster, just as we do with /hj/. —Angr 08:01, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

...the key phonetic distinction, the distinctive feature. 1. It would be the only /h/C cluster. /hj/ only occurs in /hju(-)/ and the /ju/ is considered to form the nucleus and /h/ its onset.Synchronism (talk) 08:10, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, that's not a bad argument for its phonemicity [but] it could also be an effect of the bizarre phonotactics of [h] in most of the world's languages: only C in English that cannot end a syllable, and restricted to forming clusters with approximants. It doesn't seem particularly monophonemic to me—especially if it feels like a cluster to a native speaker.kwami (talk) 09:04, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

Okay, even if [ʍ] is a voiceless approximant, not a fricative, accepting /ʍ/ as a phoneme has a much higher price than accepting /hw/ as a cluster. Synchronism says it would be the only /h/ + C cluster (if we treat /ju:/ as a diphthong, which is okay with me for the sake of the argument), but if it comes to that, /ʃr/ is the only /ʃ/ + C cluster apart from Yiddish and German loanwords. Non-/s/ fricatives generally don't form that many clusters in English anyway. But accepting phonemic /ʍ/ means accepting that [voice] can be contrastive for sonorants in English – but in practice only for one sonorant – and I think that is a much more radical, and indefensible, proposition, than suggesting that /hw/ is an acceptable cluster. —Angr 10:01, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

Kwami, since the description of [ʍ] is a labial-velar fricative, not a labialized velar fricative, it ought to be equivalent to [x͡ɸ], not [xʷ] anyway.

I like your argument. As for the nature of [ʍ], the IPA (Association) isn't very good about distinguishing primary from 2ary articulation. Ladefoged would argue that [x͡ɸ] is not likely to exist in any language, and certainly not in English. kwami (talk) 10:09, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

I think that's part of why I don't like the symbol "ʍ". If we mean [x͡ɸ] or [xʷ], we should write [x͡ɸ] or [xʷ], but of course in English we don't mean [x͡ɸ] or [xʷ]. And if we mean [w̥], we should write [w̥], since no other voiceless approximants have dedicated symbols, but are indicated with the voicelessness diacritic. "ʍ" is just superfluous. But my argument above holds just as much against a phoneme /w̥/ as against a phoneme /ʍ/. —Angr 10:27, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

Of course, how we transcribe it is irrelevant to the argument. The symbol does seem silly today, but it's just historical residue from when the IPA was designed specifically for French and English. Like ɱ, it has no justification by today's standards. (Claims of phonemic /ɱ/ in central Africa did not emerge until much later, and AFAIK have not been demonstrated to the degree that the IPA would require for establishing a new letter.) Swedish ɧ is another silly letter, especially considering that there's no letter or diacritic for Swedish u! kwami (talk) 10:36, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

Phonemes or clusters with restricted distribution are not at all uncommon around town. Remember from Linguistics 101 the exercise of showing that [h] and [ŋ] are in complementary distribution and therefore should be allophones of a single phoneme? That's the cautionary tale for taking structural phonology to its logical end. /hw/ makes perfect sense for various reasons--1) it matches [hj]; 2) ʍ would be the only voiceless sonorant; 3) historically, it is a cluster matching /hn/, /hr/, /hl/ (other h + sonorant clusters, making /hw/ not so unusual); 4) orthographically, it's more mnemonic for native speakers. (Taivo (talk) 12:54, 10 February 2009 (UTC))

And before you go pooh-poohing diachronic perspective on synchronic problems, remember that all the distributional problems in sychronic phonology are the result of old regularity (am/are, was/were, lose/forlorn, etc.) (Taivo (talk) 13:40, 10 February 2009 (UTC))

[off topic] reminds me of a way in which /hj/ is related to /hw/ and is not like other h + V groups, namely that there are accents in which /hj/ is reduced to /j/ but otherwise show no signs of h-dropping. Texans, for example, always pronounce their h's in house and hand and hundred, but many Texans drop them in Houston, huge, and human. That implies /hj/ is headed the same way that /hl/, /hn/, and /hr/ have already gone and that /hw/ is going. —Angr 22:00, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

My idiolect of English (parts Texas/Utah/Kansas) regularly drops the /h/ in "human", "huge", "hue", etc. unless I'm forcing a pronunciation with [h]. I have to force myself even harder to put an /h/ in "whale", etc. I suspect that the Old English voiceless sonorants were really underlying clusters with only a surface merger of the two segments. That makes the historical change a loss of /h/ and then a lack of environment for devoicing. It all depends on which phonological theory you are an adherent of. On the topic at hand, it seems that we have a great deal of agreement on /hw/ rather than /ʍ/, whatever our reasons are. (Taivo (talk) 22:42, 10 February 2009 (UTC))

Goood work, Kwami, though I'm a little bit uncomfortable seeing my own OR repeated in the Phonology section. —Angr 08:53, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, but no-one can blame you for it! Take out anything you don't like. It wasn't all that well ref'd to begin with, so I didn't see much harm. kwami (talk) 09:05, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

The distinction between the voiceless labialized velar approximate and a an /hw/ (a voiceless glottal fricative and/followed by a voiced labialized velar approximate) depends on where the 'breathy' sound is made. For /hw/ the turbulence is created in the glottis, by a slight closure of the vocal folds. This can take place before or during the production of /w/, and it will give the /w/ a breathy quality, rendering it different from a 'normal' /w/. For /ʍ/ the turbulence is created in the oral cavity between the velum and the part of the tongue closest it. This naturally requires a great degree more of closure and so the sound would probably be more accurately described as partially fricative and partially approximate. And then, of course, there are all matter of combination in between, and the one used by a speaker maintaining the distinction can vary in the same sentence. Remember, transformational rules are good as abstractions, but we cannot rely on them to explain away everything and give it a neat answer. Unpredictable variation is to be expected. Bearnfæder (talk) 00:40, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

Ugh. Hasn't anyone done any acoustic research on this? Bob A (talk) 19:22, 2 October 2010 (UTC)

Let me answer User:Angr, who says,

I've never seen /ʍ/ proposed as a phoneme of English (as opposed to the surface realization of /hw/) anywhere but Wikipedia.

The phoneme inventory can differ between varieties of English. Heinz Giegerich's excellent little book "English Phonology" accepts /ʍ/ as a phoneme in Scottish English. Indeed as a native speaker of Scottish Standard English and as a non-expert with undergraduate experience of linguistics, I have a very strong intuition that /ʍ/ is a phoneme in Scottish English, which is why I have queried the statement on the Article page that "speakers' intuition is that it is two consonants." Prim Ethics (talk) 16:04, 2 July 2015 (UTC)

To my non-native ears, /hw/ in dialects that maintain the /hw - w/ distinction sounds more or less like a labialized voiceless velar fricative with a weak labial offglide [xʷw̆]. I can definitely see why you'd perceive it as one sound. Peter238 (talk) 17:16, 2 July 2015 (UTC)

Maybe in some dialects with the wine-whine distinction the onset of "whine" is [xʷw̆] or [hw̆] or [ʍw̆], but I maintain that in Scottish English it is a pure [ʍ]. I like to contrast /hw/ with /hj/, the only other putative consonant cluster with /h/ in English. When I experiment with the word "hew" I can say [çuː] and I can say [çjuː], but in my natural speech the glide is definitely present. Therefore the standard analysis /hjuː/ makes sense to me. Likewise when I experiment with the word "whine" I can say [ʍʌin] and I can say [ʍw̆ʌin], but in my natural speech the glide is definitely absent. There is no voicing whatsoever until the diphthong [ʌi]. I believe it is the same for most (all?) Scottish English speakers. Therefore in Scottish English I see no reason at all to analyse the onset of "whine" as /hw/, other than the historical reason that that is how it used to be pronounced. And the time comes when we must move on and say, the phoneme inventory has changed.

I only make this claim for Scottish English. Other dialects with the wine-whine distinction may retain a glide in the onset of "whine", and in such dialects there are no doubt grounds for analysing the onset as /hw/. But not, in my view, in the case of Scottish English, which is phonologically very different from all other varieties of English. Prim Ethics (talk) 19:27, 2 July 2015 (UTC)

I think that people write /hw/ instead of /ʍ/ only because the former are the same as the latin characters, and therefore can be typed with a normal keyboard. It doesn't necessarily have to have anything to do with the phonetic realization of this consonant (which is also the reason why we write /r/ instead of /ɹ/ for the RP/GAm/GenAus rhotic). Peter238 (talk) 20:00, 2 July 2015 (UTC)

I suspect that w and wh have merged in the speech of most New Zealanders by now, but this is by no means universal. I pronounce them distinctly, with wh as a single sound, not a sequence of h and w. I have seen an article on the NZ wh in an academic magazine here. Among other things it drew attention to a fact I had never noticed, but realise is true in my own speech, namely that both sets of speakers pronounce "wharf" with an initial w. Koro Neil (talk) 01:49, 16 August 2015 (UTC)

Request: Map of the British Isles

Could someone please post a map of the British Isles (including the Channel Islands, etc.) with the isogloss demarcated? Thanks, samwaltz (talk) 15:04, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

wh vs hw

The article starts with a mention of the digraph ‹wh› and later goes into the consonant cluster /hw/. Could there please be a small distinction made early on between the two. I find the closeness of wh to hw confusing. WikiParker (talk) 22:52, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

‹› is used for what you write, // is the phoneme, [] is what you actually say. You just didn't read correctly. --2.245.156.161 (talk) 07:38, 9 October 2016 (UTC)

Dubious: isogloss map of US

Some original research to be sure but I have to take some exception with the U.S. map, though I have not looked up the reference.

I grew up in Houston, I live in Austin (TX), I have lived in California and Illinois, and my mother is from Florida. From my experience I do not believe the wine-whine distinction is as isolated as the map indicates. This distinction is certainly widespread in most of Texas, not just North Texas as the map seems to imply. My mother, though certainly from an older generation, has always had this distinction which raises questions about Florida. The merger is certainly prevalent in the upper Midwest from what I recall. But in California the distinction is still common.

It is true that some regions enunciate the distinction more fully than others but it seems misleading to imply that the distinction is all but gone in the others.

--97.231.148.19 (talk) 22:16, 7 February 2012 (UTC)

The map is based on just one source, so additional research may turn up different results, but Wikipedia has to follow what the published research says, even if it doesn't match with what our own personal experiences are. My parents are both from LA and I grew up in Rochester, NY, and Austin, TX, all of which are outside the area on the map, yet I make the distinction consistently and unselfconsciously. But I'm the one who drew the map (based on Labov et al.'s work) even though it clashes with my own experience. Angr (talk) 22:38, 7 February 2012 (UTC)

Whole?

According to Wiktionary, the <w> was added in ”whole” to differentiate it from ”hole” and is therefore not a case of this development. Which one is true? --Lundgren8 (t · c) 17:00, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

Whore doesn’t seem to be a true wh-word either, cf. German ”Hure”, Swedish ”hora”, since it evolved from PIE *k- --Lundgren8 (t · c) 17:01, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

Whether their spellings are only unetymological or quite spurious, I agree those words should be removed from the introduction -- they're special cases, and they shouldn't obfuscate the more clear-cut ones. 176.221.120.203 (talk) 15:11, 2 May 2015 (UTC)

I agree, but unlike whole, who is a case where there was actually historical /xw/, since it comes from a PIE word with initial *kʷ. — Eru·tuon 18:14, 2 May 2015 (UTC)

Huh?

This sentence is insufficient: "In dialects which maintain the distinction, it is generally transcribed [ʍ], and is equivalent to a voiceless [w̥] or [hw̥]." There is a disjunctive "or", and both exist, but there is no explanation of what they are or how they differ. After poking around, I discovered that the circles beneath the "w" in each one means it is voiceless. Naturally, I tried to pronounce each like I would normally but without voicing the "w" sound. And it turns out [w̥] sounds awfully h-like, but adding the actual "h" makes it sound exaggerated. Of course, not being a linguist, my attempt might be way off. I can't help but think it would be more reasonable if the article explained the difference between the sounds or pointed to somewhere that does. Is it not important in an article about the this sound to make it clear what sound (or sounds) it is? -Rrius (talk) 09:42, 16 April 2013 (UTC)

Exactly! Nowhere is it explained what the supposed hypercorrection is. From what is implied, it seems that /hw/ is supposed to be the "hypercorrected" form, but major dictionaries (even ones using IPA) show /hw/ as a standard pronunciation. It seems that voiceless /w/ is more of a middle-ground realization of the original /hw/. Clarification in the article would be great! 178.150.218.11 (talk) 23:57, 26 December 2013 (UTC)

I think the hypercorrection is supposed to refer to the use of [ʍ] even in words that historically have /w/ rather than /hw/. For example, in Star Trek: The Next Generation I noticed that Michael Dorn playing Worf quite consistently pronounced weapon as [ˈʍɛpən], i.e. as if it were *wheapon. Aɴɢʀ (talk) 09:55, 27 December 2013 (UTC)

Title

Any objection to changing the title of this article to something more user-friendly and representative, like Pronunciation of wh in English? W. P. Uzer (talk) 10:16, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

Moved, but now discovered Pronunciation of English ⟨th⟩, so have asked an admin to move this to be consistent with that title. W. P. Uzer (talk) 08:47, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

Dubious generalization

I'm curious about the statements regarding the merger in the US, particularly as shown in the map. The map that is in the references does not seem to back this up, though the web site does state things have changed since that map was generated. Just as a personal observation, the merger does not seem to me as widespread as the article implies. Certainly the standard American accent, as reflected in television and film, maintains this distinction. Though it is fair to say that the distinction is fading, it is still quite prevalent in the most urban areas across the country, and is still recognized by most as proper speech, even if they do not consistently used it.

-- 74.196.115.205 (talk) 02:26, 27 September 2020 (UTC)