Sometimes the word simply sounds more appropriate to its meaning if you pronounce the “h”. /hwisk/ does sound more like the action of something being whisked away, than /wisk/ does.
Didn’t Mrs. Slocombe pronoun all the "h"s when she was trying to speak “Posh”?
Maybe Klingon doesn’t have any kind of /w/ sound, so Worf had to learn to approximate it, say by enunciating a short but clear /hu/ sound. Real-world foreign language teachers often have to use essentially similar strategies with beginning students.
For any non-native speakers of English whose first languages don’t have /w/, did your English teachers do anything like this when they taught you how to pronounce it?
Well the British Isles then.
Yeah: lately I’ve been seeing “does’nt,” and “would’nt.”
Also, if I see “woah” for “whoa” one more time, I may plotz.
If you feel that way, why spell “writing” as you do?
Yeah. Slightly differently, I could understand if people used “does’n’t” or “would’n’t”, since you are contracting one word while cramming it onto a separate word. I mean, if you didn’t use contractions, they wouldn’t be “doesnot” and “wouldnot”.
Ms. Johnny is under the table did that. I keep her in the same mental bin as the kindergarten teacher who taught my niece to pronounce diamond with an extra a; once he recovered from his initial shock at how bad our English was after keeping Johnny under the table for two whole years, Brother Mateo spent several months correcting our pronounciations.
The kicker: Spanish does have /w/.
That’s what I saying turns out not to be the case. I thought of the same thing you did, but I looked it up on Wikipedia, and Klingon does have a /w/ sound, and it is just /w/ and not /ʍ/. The article does indicate dialectical variations–however, one with [ʍ] for /w/ has not been documented.
The one thing I do notice is that his parents speak with a different accent than he does. Even second generations immigrants tend to keep some of their parents’ accent. So I suspect that he had to intentionally learn the accent he uses, which does sound a bit overly proper. So maybe he learned to hypercorrect.
Or, maybe in the future, they are no longer distinct phonemes, and he just thinks [ʍ] sounds better.
Friend of mine is an English speech and language therapist who has been resident in Ireland for many years. He reckons that Irish people started enunciating hs partly due to a negative reaction to hs being dropped in some accents, especially working class ones. “tree trees” “I tink” etc. It stands to reason that Irish English speakers resident in Britain, who may have encountered mockery or other negative reactions to their accents might overcompensate a bit.
Dubliners make up for the dropped ‘h’ by putting it where it doesn’t belong:
“I tink tree weeks in thigh-land would be grand” for “I think three weeks in Thailand would be grand”.
Sounds like true Bostonians’ relationship with the letter “R”
“He pahked the cah in the Yahd. I sawr him. Then he got a slice of pizzar.”
“No ga-news is good ga-news with Gary Ga-nu”
The Great Space Coaster
So Thai isn’t pronounced like thigh? News to me.
Most Dubliners do pronounce the hs in think and three, it is just softer than in some other accents.
Although, unlike many forbears ( who wore their catholicism lightly ), I was not catholic, I went to an RC secondary school — having an Irish name helped. I never once, there or anywhere else, heard Irishness mocked.
Excepting that when having to sing Lord of the Dance we substituted our headmaster’s Irish name for the Devil. Dunno if that counts.
Also all the Irish catholic kids pretty much hated the Church and religion, whereas the rest of us were apathetic.
Irish jokes were a staple of British comedy well into the 1970s anyway but whatever about Irishness being mocked, Irish accents are and were. I’ve witnessed it a couple of times myself.
Kerry jokes were a staple of Irish comedy well into the 1970s. They seemed to roll with it.
Which has no relevance to the point I was making about enunciation of h or lack thereof in Irish accents, does it?
I think you got your As and Es mixed up.
IME Thai is pronounced tie or tye…which is certainly different from thigh. Though I could be wrong. I live in south were they pronounce shit all sorts of weird ways…
Thighland reminds me of some cheesy sex park that features big boned women…that or place where I get chicken parts in bulk for discount prices.