JCC English

I was watching one of these Schwarzenegger one-liner mashup clips, and a commenter underneath the vid had quoted Arnie as saying "Rong", as if to mock his incorrect pronunciation of 'wrong'. What, is there actually an intelligible difference in the pronunciation of the two? Do you actually stress the w when you say the word 'wrong'? How do you do that, anyway?

 

Terr_Mys

 

a beezel thread?

 

Does beezel pronounce 'wrong' wrong?

 

The sound of w is just a diphthong o. It's a transitional o sound. How do you audibly say w before a consonant (r in this case)? If I wrote 'wrong' and 'rong' on a blackboard and asked you to read them out loud, would you pronounce them any differently? Would anyone be able to tell the difference? How do you stress the w? Worong? Orong? Oorong? Bottom line is: Arnold Schwarzenegger is a hardworking American and he doesn't deserve your scorn! He's trying, damn you, he's trying!

 

Heh heh you said "dipthong" heh heh heh

 

The person who made the comment is silly. There is no modern dialect of English where /w/ exists in "wrong" or any other words with a <wr>- onset. The word begins with /r/.

As we all probably know, English orthography is far more conservative than English pronunciation. It's arguably one of the most difficult aspects of the language, both for L1 and L2 learners.

It does appear that /w/ was formerly pronounced in these <wr>- words, but has not been since at least the 1600s. I'm not sure about "wrong" specifically, since the Old Norse source is recorded as rangr (the <w> may have been inserted in the spelling in analogy to other <wr>- words where the /w/ was no longer pronounced). I found a detailed discussion here.

As for how those <wr> clusters were actually pronounced back in the day, here's one poster's take:

 

Wright. Wreally well said.

 

Hey, Terr_Mys, what about the beginnings of "wh" words, like "what" and "whale?" Back when I was teaching, we had these language arts materials that insisted the beginning of those words was a "hw-" sound. I don't believe this sound exists in my dialect, and the "hw-" lessons just annoyed everybody.

Is there a dialect of English in which (or hwich) the "hw-" sound exists? I think Mary Poppins says it, but then, Mary Poppins says a lot of things.

 

This interviewer says it like that.



It's a spoof clip, but it's the only example that came to mind where I've heard it.
(obligatory language warning)

 

DO YOU SPEAK IT?!?!?

 

"Everybody likes Cool Hwhip"

 

These "wh" words were in fact, hundreds of years ago - in Old English - "hw" words. What was hwæt. Where was hwǽr. Whale was hwæl. And so on.

Historical evidence leads us to believe that these words were indeed pronounced with an [hw] onset. For some reason, spelling standards transposed the two letters around the 13th century, but we have no concrete evidence that the pronunciation started changing (deleting the [h]) en masse until the 18th century. The change apparently originated in London, and then diffused across England.

By this point, America had already been settled by Englishmen, the vast majority of whom did not have the merger between /hw/ and /w/ when they arrived in the New World. So while England was losing the [h] sound in these words (it's basically extinct in Britain today), Americans largely retained it.

Eventually, the situation in America began to change as well. Linguistic interviews from the 1940s reported that speakers in and around coastal cities in the Northeast did not pronounce the [h] sound in these words, while other Americans still did. These cities had very close commercial ties with Britain in the 19th century, which led to the importation of numerous linguistic features from across the pond.

The most recent dialectology research shows that the loss of [h] in "wh" words spread has rapidly across the country since the studies of the 1940s. This map from the Atlas of North American English shows that the merger of /hw/ and /w/ is now nearly complete in the US. The resistance to this change is strongest in the South, but the retention of [hw] is not universal there. There are also some outliers in the Midwest and New England. On the map, red dots indicate speakers who maintain the distinction between /hw/ and /w/. Green dots are those individuals who either say OR hear them differently, while orange dots are those who pronounce them closely. Yellow dots mark speakers who have no trace of [h] in their "wh" words.

It's pretty remarkable how rare this feature is today, considering that 70 years ago, it was the norm across the United States.

 

Britons that pronounce "H" as "haich" - is that just a West Country thing?