Noel Stoutenburg wrote:
Friends:
To my response to Andre Levin's statement
>There are no English pronunciation rules that I know of that treat
> the reversal of the letter sounds as correct in any case.
in which I wrote
>"Wh" in what, where, which, white, when, and why: pronounced "hwat",
>"hwere", "hwich", "hwite", "hwen", and hwy respectively.
Phil Daley wrote:
I'd be curious to know what region of the US they do that in. I have
never heard it.
I've never heard a speaker I can identify from any part of the U.S.,
either in person, or via broadcast media, say
pronounce the "w" and "h" in their proper order, that is to say "w-hich"
or "w-hen", and while I have heard the name of the letter next before Z
in customary alphabetical order in English pronounced as "wye", I have
never heard "why" pronounced that way. Further, consulting my
dictionary, the pronunciation for every word beginning with the "wh"
dyad is specifiec as "hw", as in these examples
<http://education.yahoo.com/reference/dictionary/entry/which;_ylt=AnHj3K8fJ7VBKydHKrV2X.KsgMMF>
<http://education.yahoo.com/reference/dictionary/entry/where;_ylt=AuamstMmB174YRd95LPVqCWsgMMF>
<http://education.yahoo.com/reference/dictionary/entry/wheeze>
<http://education.yahoo.com/reference/dictionary/entry/whatchamacallit;_ylt=AiNx9_yspXF6I4akcyvVsjWsgMMF>
Thus demonstrating that the orthography of letters is no more precise
than the orthography of music -- we all know that the
notes/expressions/articulations/etc which we put on paper to represent
the music we want to hear are at best an approximation and are open to
constant interpretation and reinterpretation, so I'm constantly amazed
when people expect precision in the use of letters to represent the
sounds of verbal language. Both music and English are languages and
both are represented on paper by approximations which are subject to the
variations which different people bring to them.
No big deal except to English teachers who would be unemployed if it
weren't for the rules the force on the rest of us. :-)
Shall we all get ready to boldly split our infinitives? Or maybe we
should all work hard to figure out how to make prepositions the words we
end our sentences with.
I find this discussion of the extreme subjectivity of language
pronunciation taking place on a list dedicated to the very imprecise
world of music notation is particularly ironic.
--
David H. Bailey
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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