The whole who-- in several words including who bother me with this thing.
Are they excluded? Silent Ws?
There’s no way I can’t get my tongue around those.
Letters aren’t sounds, so there are no silent letters. Letters are approximations of sounds in some historical dialect as spelling was standardized, while pronunciation kept doing what it’s always been doing.
There have been multiple instances of labialization of /h/ and delabialization of /hw/ before rounded vowels. “How” started with /hw/ at some point.
All you can eat here:
/hw/ is an affectation in most American dialects.
Utah is not shown in the map, but also does not have the merger.
Now that I teach English, I try to drop the h’s, but it’s hard to remember.
In the link to the Wikipedia entry given in Ruken’s post #42, there’s an explanation of where wh is pronounced differently from w. It’s a much more complicated area than you might expect. It’s certainly not just a difference between the U.S. and the U.K., as is implied in the first post. It also doesn’t have anything to do with being pretentious.
When I took Spanish in college I could never roll my Rs. Complete failure. And our teacher’s name was Rosario, with a last name that was mostly Rs. Saying her name, I sounded like I had some sorta medical issue.
Speaking of Spanish and getting back to wh vs w, I thought about how the name Juan compares. To my ear the first sound is the same for Juan and whine, but different for wine. What do you all think?
Juan = hwan
Whine and wine are both the same: wine
If I heard someone pronouncing Juan that way, I would think they were trying to sound like Stewie Griffin. It must be that I just haven’t noticed the difference from other parts of the country since I don’t travel much.
Exactly right, as least as it applies to me and the dialect I hear all the time. I’m also pretty sure that this is how “Mary” was pronounced when Mary Richards was addressed in the dialogue on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, at least by most of the characters.
Good heavens, no, certainly not here in Ontario. As noted above, “Mary” and “merry” are very close, though not the same. But “marry” has a completely different “a” sound, like the “a” in “Larry”. I could say “I’m going to marry Mary” with the phonetic distinctions in the last two words being crystal clear.
Unless you’re Lord Byron writing about Don Juan.
Here’s a map for the UK: Reddit - Dive into anything
I genuinely don’t know if it’s an affectation for me: my mother’s dialect isn’t represented on either map, but her anglophone ancestors were all fairly recently from the blue areas on the British map, so it might be genuine, but it might also have been a hypercorrection she learned in school and passed on. I can’t remember how my grandparents etc. rendered the sound and am not in touch with anyone else to check.
Do you know about the various accents that do or do not pronounce Mary, marry, and merry differently as is shown in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3i9rMU8aL-U ?
Interesting, though I’m not sure I understand what your point is besides that it’s interesting. There’s no right or wrong, and I’m describing how I hear and speak those three words in my region and always have. And that is that “merry” and “Mary” are not pronounced the same but are only subtly different, but “marry” is completely different. Other regions will have different pronunciations. Vive la différence! 
This is so on the nose I can’t quite tell if this is a joke. I’d guess not, but you can totally read it as a much more subtle version of:
I clicked on your post more or less at random. My point is that there are many accents in the English-speaking countries of the world concerning how those three words are pronounced. This has nothing to do with being pretentious or what country you live in. Furthermore, this difference in how the vowel in Mary-marry-merry is pronounced is true in other words. Lots of people can’t even hear the difference in the sounds.
Me for one.
The trilled “r” in Spanish also defeated me.
Growing up in the 50s and 60s, hearing different forms of English other than the bland pronunciations of television programs was nearly impossible. Radio announcers once famously had to pass strict pronunciation tests to get their network jobs, but two decades later flat Midwestern was the only dialect heard nationwide.
Except there’s no “properly” involved. It’s simply a regionalism (likely originating from people who drop their "R"s).
That’s interesting (not being a philologist) - because in older Scottish texts one can find some words that nowadays we would spell with “wh” being spelt with “quh”. But I don’t know that that maps exactly with Scottish people aspirating those spellings (the names Farquhar and Urquhart aren’t usually, AFAIK)
Which is why I put it in quotes.
To me the vowels of merry and Mary are completely different. Also marry is a third vowel, quite distinct from the other two. What are homophones for me are merry and Murray. As I go from Mary to marry to merry, my mouth opens wider.