Today's topic is based on the spoken word again. It involves commonly used interrogatives, or words used to ask questions, such as what, when, where, and why. I hope that I am not the only person who is bothered by the "correct" pronunciation of the aforementioned words.
A childhood memory (and that goes way back) is of my mother returning home from a teachers' conference and telling us that an alleged English expert confirmed that the correct pronunciations are hwat, hwen, hwere, and hwy. Hwy is that? I promise not to confuse where with wear because the meaning will be obvious from the surrounding words. Only a well-known football player should verbally mix the order of the letters and pronounce them out of order. The rest of us should be happy to ignore the Hs and pretend that they are as silent as the t in listen.
Who makes the decisions regarding correct pronunciation? I don't know, but maybe it should be I. Whenever I hear television announcers or game show hosts or people with otherwise good radio programs using the proper form of those interrogatives, I think about how ignorant it sounds. This usage doesn't seem to have the excuse that it is based on a language of derivation, either. Please join me in my campaign to end the use of hw words. It isn't sophisticated, it's ingorant.
Hm...it isn't ignorant at all. No, I shan't join your campaign to suffocate an already marginalized pronunciation of the wh- words. The "hw" sounds are the older(i.e. hundreds of years old) pronunciations of the words, which have, for the most part, been slowly forgotten. There are some people in some regions still that pronounce them and I find that cool. Though, if that English expert were trying to "correct" the pronunciations of "who/what/when/where/who/whom/which..." then not only is he or she fighting a futile cause, (and incredibly up-mountain cause) but he or she also has an odd conception of what "correct" means. I say aither you say eether, I say awnt, you say ant, can't we just get along? There is no one correct way to pronounce most things, each dialect is different.
ReplyDeleteIt isn't ignorant at all, and especially isn't sophisticated, at least where I am and have been. Where are you?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_wh
This shows the history of the pronunciation of "wh" along with a sound clip.