Re: CHAT: the consonant QUH

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.