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WHAT, INTERROGATIVES?

10/23/2019

1 Comment

 
Today I'd like to talk about all the wh- interrogative words in English. If you look at their etymologies, they all follow a similar pattern:
  • Who came from Old English hwa
  • What came from Old English hwæt
  • When came from Old English hwenne
  • Where came from Old English hwær
  • Why came from Old English hwy
  • How came from Old English hwu
  • Which came from Old English hwilc
  • ​Whether came from Old English hwæþer
All of them started with a devoiced w sound, but now some start with a h sound and some start with a w sound (just looking at phonology, ignoring the spellings). The difference is that the initial [w] words in Old English started with hw followed by vowels made in the front of your mouth, while initial [h] sounds like those in who and how started with hw followed by a vowel closer to the back of your mouth. Through Proto-Germanic, all of the words go back to a Proto-Indo-European word sounding like kha, and then Grimm's Law uniformly shifted the sound to the Old English hw​.
1 Comment
Lucie Trávníčková
10/29/2019 03:02:52 am

Is today's pronunciation of eg. what with the initial /h/ correct or non-standard?

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    AUTHOR

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    Hello! I'm Adam Aleksic, a senior studying government and linguistics at Harvard University, where I co-founded the Harvard Undergraduate Linguistics Society. In addition to etymology, I also really enjoy trivia, politics, vexillology, geography, board games, conlanging, art history, and law. 
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