"it's no use, mr. james"
google
yahoo
bing

Cool Hwip

Posted: August 4th, 2007 | Author: emma | Filed under: linguistics, phonetics, phonology, pop-culture | 15 Comments »

Recently, on Family Guy:

And a related linguistlist post:

Proto-Indo-European */k/ developed regularly to /h/ (or /x/, if you
prefer) in the Germanic languages, by the First Germanic Consonant
Shift (Grimm’s Law). The resulting fricative was generally pronounced
[h] in syllable-initial position but [x] in syllable-final position,
much as in modern German.

The PIE initial cluster */kw-/ accordingly developed in Old English
into /hw-/: hence, for example, Old English `what’ and
`wheat’.

The spelling was changed after the Norman conquest, apparently under
Norman influence, to the modern , and hence orthographic
and .

The pronunciation remained /hw-/ in England for centuries, at least
for most speakers.

[...]

The Linguistic Atlas of the Eastern USA, compiled over a generation
ago, shows /hw-/ as normal in most places, with /w-/ the norm in just
three areas, all of them on the east coast: a large area centered on
metropolitan New York, and two smaller ones centered on Boston and
Charleston/Savannah. This distribution strongly suggests that /w-/
was introduced from England into these port cities and began spreading
out from there.

In the last generation, the innovating /w-/ has been spreading across
the USA with astounding speed. The American linguist William Bright
recently told me (p.c.) that /hw-/ was now confined to “a handful of
old fogies”. I myself (I’m from western New York State) have /hw-/,
like my parents, but my two brothers and my sister (all younger) have
only /w-/. My mother is acutely conscious of this; she notices the
/w-/ of the young people and regards it as objectionable.

15 Comments on “Cool Hwip”

  1. 1 Aidan Kehoe said at 7:11 am on August 5th, 2007:

    It’s one of the difference between English as spoken in the rest of Ireland and English as spoken in Ulster; we southerners have [hw], up North they have [w]. And Ulster is a conservative dialect too, so I suspect both pronunciations have been common for centuries (careful RP had [hw] in the early 20th, if I remember a sci.lang discussion on it properly, but it was adopted as a spelling pronunciation).

    Johnny Cash has [hw] in his ‘behold, a [hw]ite horse’ of ‘The Man Comes Around’, and pretty consistently throughout the rest of that album, as another datum.

  2. 2 Aidan Kehoe said at 7:17 am on August 5th, 2007:

    (I pronounced ‘whore’ with it for several years, since the local vernacular pronunciation I grew up with was [hu?], which evidently had nothing to do with the spelling. Only corrected myself after looking at the OED entry a couple of years ago and seeing that the standard pronunciation is [ho?].

    Also, IMO the ‘ho’ spelling is needlessly exoticising. That’s just how the word is pronounced in a non-Rhotic dialect, ffs!)

  3. 3 Aidan Kehoe said at 7:19 am on August 5th, 2007:

    Hah, your WordPress doesn’t like the rhotic modifier. Please to interpret my question marks as such!

  4. 4 Aaron said at 1:36 pm on August 5th, 2007:

    I have a friend in her mid-twenties who uses [hw]. Her parents are Chinese and don’t speak English natively, and she grew up in Texas, where the young people definitely don’t normally use [hw]. I wonder where she picked it up.

  5. 5 emma said at 2:52 pm on August 5th, 2007:

    Aaron, that’s actually really funny because Celeste notes that I do the same thing. Similar circumstances here, too: non-native English speaker parents and raised in an environment where [hw] definitely is not the norm.

  6. 6 simon charlow said at 4:41 pm on August 6th, 2007:

    i cant make heads or tails of this:

    Also, IMO the ‘ho’ spelling is needlessly exoticising. That’s just how the word is pronounced in a non-Rhotic dialect, ffs!)

    are you suggesting that a spelling convention largely unknown to americans should be preferable to “ho” by virtue of being less “exoticising”?

  7. 7 Aaron said at 9:23 pm on August 6th, 2007:

    So any ideas where you picked it up?

  8. 8 Celeste said at 2:53 am on August 7th, 2007:

    I’m pretty sure Emma picked it up from watching too much Family Guy. I think that is the most reasonable explanation, yeah?

  9. 9 Aidan Kehoe said at 3:56 am on August 8th, 2007:

    are you suggesting that a spelling convention largely unknown to americans should be preferable to “ho” by virtue of being less “exoticising”?

    There are several non-Rhotic dialect areas in the US, in economically important parts of the country. FDR, JFK and Jimmy Carter were non-rhotic, and their presidencies were at times when access to audio media meant everyone was familiar with how they spoke. Writing [ho:] ‘whore’ if Jimmy Carter says it, and ‘ho’ if Chris Rock says it, is needlessly exoticising.

  10. 10 simon charlow said at 1:44 am on August 13th, 2007:

    but that line of reasoning relies (rather incredibly) on [hoU] and [hoUr] being dialectically varying pronunciations of the same word “whore,” which they’re clearly not. i certainly have both [hoU] and [hoUr] in my dialect, and i’d wager that the vast majority of american english speakers are the same. chris rock doesn’t say “whore” [hoU]. he says “ho” [hoU]. the latter is slang; the former is not.

  11. 11 Aaron said at 1:45 pm on August 13th, 2007:

    Although it should be noted that the word ‘ho’ (which I agree is an independent lexical item nowadays) probably came about as an imitation of a dialectical variant of ‘whore’, right?

  12. 12 Aidan Kehoe said at 4:04 pm on August 13th, 2007:

    but that line of reasoning relies (rather incredibly) on [hoU] and [hoUr] being dialectically varying pronunciations of the same word “whore,” which they’re clearly not.

    You’re neither English nor Australian, you don’t have a diphthong there. And ‘clearly’ really doesn’t work for me there; are ‘shit’ and ‘shite’ the same word? To me they are. Just as [huʳ] (the pronunciation I grew up with) and [hoʳ] (the standard English word) are.

  13. 13 simon charlow said at 7:17 pm on August 13th, 2007:

    im not a phonologist, but we learned the “o” sound as a diphthong in intro linguistics. but it’s not a relevant point anyway.

    this line of argument would stand if you had shown that the relationship between “shit” and “shite” was the same as that between “whore” and “ho.” since you haven’t done this, the point is something of a non sequitor.

  14. 14 Aaron said at 10:28 pm on August 13th, 2007:

    Yeah, I’m pretty sure it’s a diphthong in American English generally.

  15. 15 Chris P said at 12:30 pm on September 15th, 2009:

    Obviously where you’re from. UK, shit and shite are totally differing words – the meaning also similarly differs in some regional dialects.

Leave a Reply