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

From:BP Jonsson <bpj@...>
Date:Monday, March 20, 2000, 10:05
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