If a teacher must resort to using a tissue to prove that someone is pronouncing something “correctly” then the “correct” pronunciation is not audibly different from the incorrect one and is therefore meaningless. If you must use a chemical analysis to determine if something tastes different, then it doesn’t.
I’m not actually saying that the two pronunciations are the same, just that the teacher’s methods are stupid.
Ha…it’s obvious you didn’t have to go through Education Australia during the 40’s, 50’s or 60’s then!!
IOW, they’re not homophones to my ‘ear’. Whales incorporates an extra ‘whoosh’, on the WHA bit, whilst WALES sounds like WAILS with no extra emPHARsis on the WA bit geddit??
Yeah I know the difference in how they sound. Just means it’s a silly teaching technique. Though I suppose it may be useful for demonstrating to the student whether they’re doing it right or not.
Paging Fred Dibnah!
He used to pronounce it including the W (sort of ‘wole’, but more breathy because of the H)
Whales sounds nothing like Cymru. 
This sounds similar to the Great Vowel Shift - I’m sure I once learnt how once upon a time wasps were ‘waps’ and birds were ‘brids’. I’ve tried googling this phenomenon, but just get hundreds of typos on ornithological sites…
Where do we disagree?!
You’ve just never heard the North Atlantic Humpback Males Chorus doing “Cwm Rhondda” or “Ar Hyd y Nos”!! 
No, but if proposition 304 passes…
I thinks there’s a different name for what you’re talking about. Interestingly, some older people in Scotland pronounce ‘pattern’ and ‘modern’ with a ‘…ren’ at the end.
What I was mentioning just affected spelling, not the pronounciation (the dropping of the aspirated ‘h’ would have happened later). There were other changes made by the Normans in order to make written English look more like French: they put in ‘ou’ instead of ‘u’, and added an ‘h’ to words like ‘chin’. Previously the ‘ch’ sound in English was spelt ‘c’, which caused confusion. At the time the ‘ch’ spelling was pronounced the same in French as it is in English and Spanish today.
Just another data point . . .
California native born in '47. Aspirate many “wh” words, like white and wheel. So to me, whales is different from Wales, whither from wither, whine/wine, and so on, except for whole, which sounds the same as hole, and, for that matter, which, which sounds the same as witch. Go figure.
Don’t forget “who.” Or “whore.” Or any “wh” word that doesn’t contain a “w” sound. Interesting about “which,” I wonder why that one would not get aspirated. (I was taught to aspirate it myself.)
Yeah, I think I’m ambidextrous on “which.” I’ve been sitting here whispering (heh) it under my breath–thankfully my office mate is in a meeting–and it comes out both ways.
From Moby-Dick:
We Midwesterners make no distinction among “marry,” “merry” and “Mary,” pronouncing all three like “merry.” When I lived in NYC, I had to learn to pronounce them differently, and when I returned to Ohio, had to re-learn them. (This paralleled the pop/soda distinction as well.)
As far as “whales” and “Wales” are concerned: In all of my 62 years, I’ve known only two people who aspirated the “wh.” One was from somewhere in Ohio, and the other was from Oakland, CA.
I don’t think the WH/HW thing is regional. I grew up in the south and never heard it there. There only two people I’ve ever heard do it are my dad - from southern California, and a former co-worker - from Oregon.
I’ve never been able to nail the Berry/Barry thing. It’s all Berry to me. Saying Barry requires a lot of effort and a faux New Yawk accent. Luckily I’ve only met one Barry as an adult and we spoke for all of maybe 12 seconds.
Words beginning in ‘wh’, which are virtually all native Anglo-Saxon in origin, were originally written ‘hw’, e.g. hwal, A.S. for whale. I’d be interested to know when the spelling change took place.
To me word pairs like the above, or “whether”/“weather”, etc., are not homophones, but it’s interesting to observe that such pairs are almost always syntactically distinct, so the likelihood of misunderstanding a speaker is negligible. There is one exception I can think of…“bad weather” could be misunderstood as “bad wether” (a male sheep with an attitude problem), but the latter word is so rarely heard these days it doesn’t matter. I suspect that this situation may explain why the distinction is disappearing in some dialects.
I certainly pronounce and hear them differently. “Whales” , and most other words that have the “wh” letter combo in them, are actually pronounced as if the letter order were “hw”. Therefore hwales.
“hw” ≠ “w”, phonetically.
Is someone says “Wen is dinner?” or “Did you where that jacket to the party?”, I’m going to look at them a bit strangely and then shrug and figure that they can’t talk right.
Charles is not and never has been the Prince of Whales.
I should add also that I hear a distinct difference between “k” and the Germanic/Scottish “ach”, between that and the Germanic “ich”, & between that and the English “sh”.
And between all of them and the chwh sound that many Hispanics substitute for “wh”:
Chwhen are you coming to dinner?
Some people don’t hear differences where others do. There are difference I don’t readily hear. It’s my understanding that most folks from the UK would say that the vowel in “path” is neither akin to the vowel sound in “bat” nor to the one in “father”. If you’ve heard a lot of Americans trying to imitate British English pronunciation I’d imagine you hear a lot of overly drawn-out “aa” sounds in words that ought to be sounded like the vowel in path? To most of us, and to me for sure, that middle in-between vowel sound just doesn’t exist as a separate entity.
As a kid growing up in the south I heard no difference between pin and pen either (not just that I didn’t say them differently myself, but that I’d hear no difference when the TV reporter said them on TV in midwestern American-standard either). Now I do though.