Re: [h] approximations (was: /s/ -> /h/ )

At 12:08 02.2.2000 +0100, Dan Sulani wrote:
>     It seems to me that it all depends upon how close together
>the lips are. ( The smaller the opening through which the air
>is forced, the more likelihood of friction, no? )
>     For me, "wet" and "whet" are usually homonymous. But if,
>for some reason, I want to emphasize the "wh", I tend to purse
>my lips together rather tightly, coarticulating the [h] with what,
>to my ears, sounds very much like a  (rounded, unvoiced)
>bilabial fricative.

In other words your emphatic pronunciation of "wh" is a bilabial fricative
-- "phi" in IPA (ancient IPA actually had small-cap {F} for the sound, so
[F] seems a good choice to symbolize it in ASCII) --, which still is a very
different sound from the [hw] used by those Irish-English and American
speakers who distinguish "wh" from "w" habitually.  Dialectal Scots -- tho
not Scottish-English, AFAIK -- has [F] for "wh"; you don't by any chance
hail from those parts?


/BP

"Doubt grows with knowledge" -Goethe