Septimus, from what I’ve read, “phonesthemes” are one way to extend the fact that unrelated languages (i.e., no common ancestry, nor borrowing) tend to have similar-sounding words for certain concepts, beyond pure onomatopoeia (“meow” or “buzz”).
This is least controversial for “mama” and “papa/dada” – sounds that simply reflect the order in which babies tend to achieve command of sounds, paralleling the order they get to know people in their orbit.
Only slightly more controversial is the idea that dikdiks – I mean, deictics (words that “point”) – use sounds in the mouth that physically represent “near” and “far.” (This may extend to deictics in the broadest sense, to include personal pronouns).
This is a little different than sound association WITHIN a language or language family, whereby new words are created or rise in popularity because of a sound association with an existing word. Linguists debate whether “sn-” for nosy things, or “wr-” for twisty things, is this sort of sound association family, or something more universal like the examples I mentioned earlier.
I thought the idea of pronouncing the “w” in “write” seemed absurd. Then I said the words “write” and “right” aloud and paid attention to my mouth. I do move my lips differently with a “wr-“ word. I’m not sure if the difference is even audible but I can feel it.
I’ve lived in the greater Seattle area my entire life and I’ve only lived elsewhere for brief times. I have no idea how or when I’d developed that. It must have been something I’d learned subconsciously as I developed speech and I never knew I did it. Our brains are so weird. (Or at least mine is.)
That’s my understanding of it too, and that was once “proper” english to enunciate the “w” and “wh” sound, as in "wheel, whip etc. Someone pronouncing the word “what” as “wut” was considered low class. Observationally, I’d say that faded beginning in the mid 1950s. The fading of ‘Transatlantic English’ may have mirrored this.
For me, /wr/ and /r/ are completely merged into a partially rounded [ɹ] (American R) sound that may get more or less rounded depending emphasis. When overenunciating for the sake of clarity, my /r/ is quite rounded.
In other words, to me, both /r/ is always rounded, so the W doesn’t change anything.
Modern English dictionaries aren’t based on corpora and prescriptive examples like 1828 Webster dictionary do not have pronunciation guides. They are descriptive as that is what sells but the modern field of linguistics is also typically descriptive too.
Reply:
I am also in the Seattle area and I actually called a life long friend who is the head of the ESL program at a Seattle area college. As I don’t have permission to hand out his contact info I won’t mention which one. I asked the question and he went to go and ask their “Pronunciation Professor”; which to be honest I didn’t even know was a thing a person could be.
Anyway this “Pronunciation Professor” said that it is a common feature with many accents including those in the American West so it would be expected you would have this behavior. She also said that it doesn’t matter and that almost no speakers except those trying to over-correct based on cultural aspirations would even notice. While the American English and BBC english lexicons wouldn’t mark the difference, neither choice is ‘proper’ and she wouldn’t ever attempt to correct either in the case of the words in the OP.
This is obviously just an opinion of one professor who lives in an area where the letters are typically sounded but it agrees with my personal research.
As a person who suffers from a form of dysgraphia I am grateful I grew up with this <wh-> accent as it is helpful for spelling which is insanely complex in English.