Posted: Apr 29, 2013 9:57 am
epepke wrote:Onyx8 wrote:Well, I'm still with you so far.
This is perhaps OT just yet, but in the words: WHy, WHere, WHen etc. why is it that the word is spelt W+H but is pronounced H+W?
Maybe that's a spelling question rather than linguistics? Or it's just dumb....
As the man says, that's orthotics. I don't know when the convention came about or why, but there is a consistent convention. It's not really H-W. It is when you think about it and say it slowly, but when you say it fast, it's really an unvoiced W. That is, you say W, but without the vocal cords making a noise. It eventually is voiced because you have to start saying the vowel eventually, but the basic difference between "wail" and "whale" is that in the latter you wait a bit before voicing it. HW probably would have made more sense, but you can think of WH as a W that is a bit like an H.
It's used elsewhere. In "Buddha," the "ddh" is supposed to be softer, a bit more H-like, than a regular "d." I don't know what the extra "d" is for, though. Or "dharma." In those cases, it's supposed to make it a bit more like a phoneme that doesn't exist in English.
As you can see by the minimal pair "wail" and "whale," those are two different phonemes in English. Many languages, they're the same phoneme.
It's a distinction that is being lost in large areas, though, called the wine-whine merger. The /hw/ pronunciation is a result of a sound change, possibly, where the voicelessness simply got its onset move back a bit so the w part appears after the voiceless air stream.
I guess WH is written as it is because English likes to put -h after consonants to create digraphs: ph, sh, th, ch; if you think about it, any of those could just as well be written the other way around. So it'd be a bit odd to break that pattern. It was written HW up until Middle English, and I'd guess the change simply was influence from the other digraphs.
As for the spelling of buddha, it doesn't really affect the English pronunciation, but just transliterates some detail from some Asian language, it's really a superfluous spelling detail, to be honest. I bet a lot of people try to spelling-pronounce it as something distinct from budda, but ... no such difference really is implied.