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Re: CHAT: the consonant QUH

From:And Rosta <a.rosta@...>
Date:Wednesday, December 8, 1999, 15:12
Lars Henrik Mathiesen
> > > Date: Wed, 8 Dec 1999 17:48:43 +1300 > > From: andrew <hobbit@...> > > > [...] the ficticious arch-Tory Francis Urquhart. [...] > > And that name has one of the weirder regular spellings I've met. IIRC, > it comes from Scots, where they used to have (and perhaps still have) > phonemic aspiration of stops. One such stop was the labialized velar, > spelled <qu> when not aspirated. > > So where does a rational person put the <h> to denote aspiration --- > Urqhuart or Urquhart? Both are weird, but they chose the latter. (Very > possibly because because printers at the time had many more <qu> types > than single <q>s and <u>s in their cases).
I thought <quh> was just how the scots used to spell what the english spell with <wh>. (But probably that's nothing more than my impression from reading old & scotsy texts.)
> To me the name looks like it should have three syllables, but it never > did. The current English pronunciation is something like /3:k3d/, > isn't it?
Quite possibly that is the pukka pronunciation. I, tho, say /3:k@t/. --and.