Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected].
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected] or [email protected]
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
I thought it was the 'w' that had made the sound all along, perhaps modified by the 'o'. The 'o' then became a schwa or an unnecessary similar sound and was then dropped as redundant. "hwo" followed the same development, but we spell that "who" these days.
We know that the modern /u:/ is not from that old /w/ because other words followed the same change - even words without /w/, like "moon", "poop" (yup) or "boot". In fact it's how the digraph ⟨oo⟩ became associated with the sound.
The case of "hwo"→"who" is a bit more complicated. As you said the "wh" digraph used to be "hw"; the change happened in Early Modern times, and it was likely for readability - less sequential short strokes = easier to read. People around those times did other weird stuff like respelling "u" as "o", as in the word "luue"→"loue" (modern "love"), for the same reason.
However, later on that /hw/ sequence of phonemes started merging into a single sound, [ʍ]: like [w] you round your lips to pronounce it, but like [h] you don't vibrate your vocal folds. And if that [ʍ] happened before a rounded vowel - like [o:] or similar - it was reanalysed as a plain /h/. So for words like "who", it's like the "w" was dropped, just like in "two", but in a really roundabout way.
And, before non-rounded vowels, that [ʍ] still survives in plenty dialects; for example, "when" as either [ʍɛn] or [wɛn]. This change is recent enough that you still have some speakers in NZ and USA who use [ʍ].
I guess my confusion comes from the fact I'm from a place that only within the last 100 years or so has all but lost the original "hw" in "correct" speech, except in "who", and I was thinking that the 'w' had to have been preserved, especially if the 'h' was.
There's also that the 'w' hasn't vanished in "twenty" (or "twain", etc.).
No worries - plus the whole thing is damn counter-intuitive, both "sounds fusing together but still conveying two phonemes" and "that sound was analysed as one phoneme, now as another" are kind of weird.