Re: final editing pass

On Mon, 02 Jan 2006 14:22:46 -0800, "R. L."
<see-sig@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
<news:kf9jr11c14tout7ug8uhbk27vag2qojrqe@xxxxxxx> in
rec.arts.sf.composition:

> On Mon, 02 Jan 2006 16:51:09 -0500, "John W. Kennedy"
> <jwkenne@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>>nyra wrote:

>>> Bill Swears schrieb:

>>>> Brian M. Scott wrote:

>>>>> On Sun, 01 Jan 2006 11:52:13 -0900, Bill Swears
>>>>> <wswears@xxxxxxx> wrote in
>>>>> <news:11rgg7l5q64m3af@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> in
>>>>> rec.arts.sf.composition:

>>>>> [...]

>>>>>> I'm teaching my daughter to use [wh]. Am I waisting my time?

>>>>> Probably, at least in the long run.

>>>> This has been going on for a very long time. Teri and I were just
>>>> talking, and I found out she wasn't taught the difference in school.
>>>> She pronounces <which> and <witch> as homophones.

> That's quite a surprise to me.

The two are now homophones for the majority of native
speakers in both England and the U.S.

>>> Could someone fill me in on what the difference between
>>> [w] and [wh] is? As someone who only writes and almost
>>> never speaks english, i can only say that i wouldn't
>>> pronounce the two as homophones: because the latter
>>> inevitably turns into 'vitsh'.

> See, er, hear the soundtrack from the classic WIZARD OF OZ
> movie? "Which old witch?" Gosh, the lips and tongue do
> quite different things.

Depends on how one pronounces the sound written <wh>; for
some the only difference is in voicing, <w> being voiced and
<wh> unvoiced.

>> Although "wh" is the conventional spelling, it is
>> pronounced almost like "hw". From the earliest records
>> of the English language until the last generation or
>> so, such pairs as "which" and "witch", "when" and "wen",
>> "why" and "wye", "whoa" and "woe", "where" and "wear",
>> "whee" and "we", have been pronounced with a distinct
>> difference. As a child, I had a certain fascination
>> with phonetics, and I remember being perfectly aware
>> that I made the distinction myself, ca. 1960, living in
>> Maine, and I also remember noting that I had lost it,
>> ca. 1970, living in New Jersey.

> This is the first I've heard of the loss as anything but a
> low class and/or Northern urban ethnic sort of thing. I
> grew up in Texas, of Georgia/Tennessee family, then
> mostly drifted to the West Coast with some time around
> Thai expat types and Northern India speech.

See
<http://groups.google.com/group/sci.lang/msg/57c7829dffda740f>
and
<http://groups.google.com/group/sci.lang/msg/d3818b08e69bef30>;
the author is a linguist. (Or better, was: sad to say, he
died a year or so ago.) From the latter:

I have another example. I grew up pronouncing the
initial /hw-/ cluster in words like 'what' and 'white'.
So, for me, 'whine' is pronounced differently from
'wine', and 'whales' differently from 'Wales'.

When I was growing up, this pronunciation was
practically universal in the USA. According to the
records I've seen, there were at the time only three
small areas in the country in which the /h/ had been
lost from /hw/.

But, no sooner had I learned this pronunciation,
when American pronunciation began to change with
blinding speed. An American colleague tells me that
there is perhaps no American under the age of
fifty or so who still pronounces /hw/. My three
younger siblings all lack it. My mother noticed this
change in pronunciation, and she described the new
pronunciation as "sloppy".

But I still have it. Several years ago, another
American, about 25 years younger than me, joined
my department here at Sussex. And she tells me
that she regards the use of /hw/ as "pretentious".

So, in the space of a few decades, I have gone from
being a perfectly normal speaker, indistinguishable
from everybody else, to being pretentious -- again
without doing anything.

Brian
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: O.T. Robert Kennedy
    ... Bill Clinton speak and commented to several people how great a speaker ... Amazing that other speakers mis-speak, yet no one thinks anything of it, ... who realizes that 'nuclear' and 'nucular' are accepted ... Pronunciation, a sequence of sounds that directly reflects the spelled ...
    (rec.arts.tv.soaps.abc)
  • Re: Capitalization: mom, dad
    ... A typical US pronunciation of center and a typical UK pronunciation of ... American speech and wanted to imitate it. ... regard it simply as the American spelling of mum and say mum just as ... The two basic pronunciations of "mobile" (AmE, ...
    (alt.usage.english)
  • Re: O.T. Robert Kennedy
    ... You can go to whitehouse.gov and listen to many of President Bush's ... Amazing that other speakers mis-speak, yet no one thinks anything of it, ... who realizes that 'nuclear' and 'nucular' are accepted ... Pronunciation, a sequence of sounds that directly reflects the spelled ...
    (rec.arts.tv.soaps.abc)
  • Re: Pronunciation dictionaries?
    ... keys found in English dictionaries, which except for the OED, isn't IPA. ... This bizarre American atavism is getting increasingly common in undertranslated pocket dictionaries and travel guides to exotic places like sher-NAYV or KAHR-law-vee VAH-ree. ... The last few years I've even seen American pronunciation spelling in online newspaper articles that are translated from syndicated American material. ... I can see that added dots and lines can help to identify syllables and distinguish between homographs and thus serve as a guide to pronunciation within an oddly spelt language like English, but how could that system work for languages that differ from English in phonetics and ortography? ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: BBC does it again
    ... Spanish pronunciation). ... sort of mockery of an American pronunciation if anything, ... pronunciation into British English, as well as a fairly plausible ... You do realize it isn't Latin, ...
    (sci.lang)
Loading