Do you pronounce the 'h' in words such as 'whip' and 'while' ?

[TheTecknician]

If you do, hwy ?

Seriously, this is something I've noticed in people's speech as I've got older. I'm fairly sure I was taught at school that the 'h' in these and other words was silent but maybe it's not necessarily so. Perhaps it's a matter of regional pronunciation or dialect.

Stevie Griffin says 'coolhwip' in Family Guy.

This thread has blown my mind. I’m in the which is said differently to witch camp but it’s not about the ‘h’ being pronounced first it’s about the ‘wh’ sound being totally different to ‘w’. So hard to describe. I’m of Scottish descent but left when I was tiny, so perhaps via my parents? No accent though.

Fascinating!

As is always the way on these wonderful threads, I still can’t hear it!

Worse, nurse and purse all sound the same to me ✔️
Horse, hoarse, gorse, force, Norse all sound the same, with the aw sound from awful. Or from snore.

So is hoarse a bit like boss?

I think the breathy w sound is hard to describe, but easiest written as hw.

We used to use a candle flame (or a damp finger tip!) to show the different sounds. Plosives like b, p make the flame dance. So does ‘wh’.

What winds those of us who do say which/witch different is posters popping in to say that the "British" spelling is X and therefore we are wrong.

Although I suppose they are just to be pitied for their lack of knowledge about how people from different parts of the country speak.

This, and when we teach phonics we teach wh as a sound along with ch, sh and th.

We had problems with exercises in textbooks that asked the pupils to choose words that sounded the same eg weather and whether. Doesn't work in our accent.

I hear the differences clearly.

My throat is hoarse - ‘o’. The horse ate the corn - ‘aw’. Throat and corn don’t sound the same, do they?

Throat and corn are different.

Hoarse sits with corn for me.

Throat sits with groat, coat, moat.

How many syllables is hoarse for you (mine is one)? Is it a hoe-uss kind of sound?

Scottish, Wales and whales sound completely different to me.

I’m not sure about imagining the h in front of the W (the linguistic history and transposition by the Flemish printers is fascinating!), I’d just describe it as exhaling when you start the word (so of course you have to inhale first).

I taught my son (born and raised in London with an English Dad), he did it till he went to nursery then lost it. He’s 9 now and likes to do impressions of me, his Scottish accent is pretty good so I must see if he’s remembered the “wh”s…

@PrizedPickledPopcorn one syllable in hoarse. Of course. 😁

I know an old lady who swallowed a horse. She’s dead, of course!

To a Scot, horse has a very open, short, round mouthed vowel, would indeed be the same as “boss”.

Hoarse, on the other hand, is the same sound that we use in “grow”, “blow” etc. I don’t think it exists in RP.

This has turned into a far bigger discussion than I expected. Fascinating.

Awesome. explanation here, for those of us who can’t hear horse and hoarse differently.
I think both words are slightly different from the merged version many of us use.

horse being more open, almost ‘ar’
hoarse being more closed like hose, but a softer s and and r inserted. Very roughly!

video about hoarse horse merger.

I pronounce Aldi and Audi the same and some people think that’s funny but when they say the words they sound the same to me.

So do I, they are the same pronunciation

Although on a documentary the other day I heard an ex employee say Leedle, for Lidl.

I call Aldi 'Mouldy'. That's sufficiently distinct from Audi.

All-di
Ow-di

DH says Bold and Bald the same. I hate it. Also tongue and tong. It really sets my teeth on edge which is odd as I generally enjoy accents,

Most Irish accents do pronounce the h in those words.
Do witch and which sound the same when you say them?
Or wine and whine?
If not, you’re pronouncing the h.

More like hwip.
You can hear people say it with and without the h in this link.
https://forvo.com/word/whip/

Just love Stewie when he does the Cool Whip, hilarious 😆

Not very noticeably. I’ve just been saying while and wile to myself to check, and there is a slight difference, but it doesn’t shout at you.

When he’s acting he does but if you hear him being interviewed he definitely has a West Yorkshire twang. I left Huddersfield at 18 for uni and have a very neutral RP but when I go home I quickly slip back to Yorkshire. He has, what we call a posh Yorkshire accent where you don’t drop letters but the syntax and the pacing is the same.
Like most regional accents, when you live there you can pretty much pin point where someone lives. The Huddersfield and Leeds accents are very distinctly different to my ear but to a southerner they all sound like they’re from Emmerdale.

I suspect the the Scottish and Irish variants are due to English being a second language. Gaelic pronunciation is very complex and there isn’t an equivalent in English to the way h’s are pronounced. As they learned English as a second language they pronounced words phonetically but using Gaelic phonetics.

The letter h is a soft sound in native English but in Gaelic, like the rolled r, it is formed at the back of the mouth with the base of the the tongue and soft palate, rather than with just the breath. It’s a sound more like clearing the throat. The French use the same method to produce many of their sounds and there is an historic link between France and Scotland.

We learn how to produce the sounds that make up native speech early on which often hinders pronunciation of foreign languages.
Someone speaking English with a French accent sounds different because of the way they form the words and individual letters in the mouth. It’s the same for every variation of spoken English. Areas with high levels of movement during the Industrial Revolution have distinctive accents because of the incorporation of various accents, Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham are good examples. Migration of iron and steel workers from all over the country produced their unique accents. Whereas the big Yorkshire cities didn’t see a huge influx of outsiders just migration from the surrounding rural areas to the mill towns. The wool weavers were already close by.

Do they? I’m Scottish and I don’t think I do nor the rest of the people I know.

Irish too. Americans and Canada also for the most part? It does help with the spelling if eg Where and Were sound quite distinct. On the other hand a lot of English jokes depend on the punning homophones I think....so I would come across as a bit humourless when I first lived in London.

I agree with you in general, but in the wine-whine merger I think the sound in whine was gradually lost in England, rather than it being said differently elsewhere because of the influence of other languages.

Horse and hoarse are exactly the same pronunciation to me. (both sound like 'horse' without pronouncing the r)
I also say poor, pour, pore and paw exactly the same. (all sound like 'paw')