> > > reminds me of the several occasions when a big to-do has been made of the fact that I pronounce the "h" as well as the "w" in words that begin with "wh". Apparently, everyone else pronounces "which" as "witch", "white" as "wight", "where" as "wear", and so forth. Am I the only one out here that gives the lowly "h" its proper due?
> > >
> > > Bonus random neural firing: WHy is it that WHen both the "w" and the "h" in a "wh" word are pronounced, they are spoken as though the "h" came first? "Where" sounds like "hwere", at least to me. I guess, though, that trying to pronounce the "w" first just makes the word sound like "wuh-hair". Eh, *shrug*. All I know is that I love this ridiculous native tongue of mine.
> > >
> > > Iss "let me wuh-hisper in your ear, doo da doo" achar
> > >

> > Do they pronounce the H first in Britain? The early US, in its anti-British attitudes, changed the standard spellings of English, so couldn't they change their pronunciation, too?
> >
> > gab"Hwy not?"by
>
> To me, the pronunciation of "wh" words as "hw" evokes dreadful upper-class and middle-class-pretending-to-be-upper-class Pommie pretentiousness. OK, it's not pretentious if you genuinely do speak that way, but that's the way it always sounds to me. Sorry.

Whoa, you really find that so, B-G??? At first I couldn't grasp what Issachar was getting at, what with the 'wh' sounding like 'hw'; but careful enunciation of words like "while" and "which" has convinced me that an understated, lingual 'h' sound does indeed seem to be aspirated *before* the 'w' is pronounced. Then too I recall, years ago (when "Beowulf" was being mashed into my head) that in Old English, words like "why", "who", "what" were once written something along the lines of "hwy", "hwa", and "hwaet", respectively. I really can't read OE but I do remember that particular quirk. Seems to me that the ancient spelling is more representative of what's actually said; modern English has a mangled version of the morphemic syntax.