I remember in grade school one of my teachers drilling us on the proper pronounciation of words starting with “wh” (whale, what, whether). She’d have us practice pronouncing with our hand in front of our mouth; we were supposed to feel our breath when we’d pronounced it correctly.
Thing is, I always thought it sounded the same: what/watt, weather/whether, where/ware (sp).
So, is there really supposed to be a difference in how “wh” and “w” are pronounced?
(And don’t get me started on “who”, where you can’t even hear a “w” sound!)
The aspirated “w” sound is a regional thing–some American dialects have it and some American dialects don’t. I’ve lived in Kansas and Indiana and quite frankly, the only people I’ve ever encountered who actually used this phoneme were the more irritating of my elementary school teachers–maybe they’re told that “proper” people use it, or something. The difference between “w” and “wh” does not exist in my dialect, or those of any of my family, friends, or colleagues.
As far as the what/watt distinction, I use a schwa in “what” and the frog in “watt.”
WAG here, but I think the aspirated “W” sound is essentially obsolete in English. It probably used to serve a useful purpose in English’s early days, but the two different “W” sounds don’t seem to serve much purpose now.
This is very different from some other languages. Others, such as Tibetan, have several aspirated and non-aspirated consonants, which serve as entirely different letter of the alphabet. The subtle differences in pronunciation will change the word you are attempting to say, and thus the intended meaning of your message - tricky business. Tibetan actually has aspirated and a non-aspirated labial consonants, like “B” and “P”. As you can imagine, the difference between a “Bu” sound and a “Buh” sound can be tricky indeed.
Some English speakers still maintain the distinction. Olpeculiar is largely correct, though – the distinction is essentially functionally obsolete. It’s no longer necessary to convey meaning.
Olpeculiar, the arpirated [w] in older forms of English is related to the “qu-” in Latin. Both are traceable back to Proto-Indo-European “*kw-”.
That makes about as much sense to me as saying that there’s very little difference between a “T” sound and a “D” sound, so they’re essentially obsolete, and the two different sounds don’t seem to serve much purpose. Although I could understand someone who used only one sound or the other, the two different sounds make it easier to understand what someone is saying.
Linguists usually write the “wh” sound as “hw” or as a turned w. “Hw” makes more sense to me than “wh” because it’s closer to the way the sound is actually made.
I would hesitate to call it an “aspirated” sound. True phonemic aspiration, as in most Indo-Aryan languages, occurs simultaneously with the main articulated sound, whereas in this case, the “h” comes noticeably before the “w.” (I say “phonemic aspiration,” because aspirated and non-aspirated versions of sounds exist in English as morphemes (listen carefully to the difference in the Ts in “take” and “cat”), but they are generally not detected by speakers.)
That stuff about
I also understand that Scottish accents faithfully preserve the difference between the two phonemes. While it has died out in most modern American accents, I would hesitate to say that it is obsolete.
When I was doing Philly Story last year, my dialogue coach told me that aspirating my "wh"s would make me sound more pre-WWII Northeastern “Old Money”. FWIW.
This just goes to show what happens when you don’t get out much. I literally had *no idea * that the “wh” was obsolete. Everyone I come into contact with says “what”, not “wat”.
As I understand it, classical Greek also had an aspirated “P”. The Greek letter that looks like a circle with a vertical line through it is transcribed “phi”, rather than “fi”, because it was originally pronounced as an aspirated “pi”, not with the f sound now associated with ph.
For some reason (or maybe no reason) I associate the failure to make the w/wh distinction with midwestern and west coast dialects. (The same dialects that make no discernable distinction between “wok” and “walk,” to cite a similar example.)
Contrapuntal, I assumed you were American. If not, then listen to the dialects on television won’t help much (unless you can receive some American shows).
I rarely speak to teenagers. And, at the risk of being trampled by the True Believers, I must reveal that I even more rarely watch TV. I am American, however.