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An interrogative word or question word is a function word used to ask a question, such as what, which, when, where, who, whom, whose, why, whether and how. They are sometimes called wh-words , because in English most of them start with wh- (compare Five Ws ).
The English interrogative words (also known as "wh words" or "wh forms") are words in English with a central role in forming interrogative phrases and clauses and in asking questions. The main members associated with open-ended questions are how, what, when, where, which, who, whom, whose, and why, all of which also have -ever forms (e.g ...
The pronunciation of the digraph wh in English has changed over time, and still varies today between different regions and accents.It is now most commonly pronounced /w/, the same as a plain initial w , although some dialects, particularly those of Scotland, Ireland, and the Southern United States, retain the traditional pronunciation /hw/, generally realized as [], a voiceless "w" sound.
The pronunciation of English relative words starting with the wh digraph involves a phonetic element historically pronounced as /hw/ and now variously realized as /w/ or /ʍ/. [ 30 ] : 14 Speakers with the whine - wine merger generally use /w/ , resulting in words like which , and why being pronounced with an initial /w/ sound, homophonous with ...
In English, most of the interrogative words begin with the same letters, wh-; in Latin, most also begin with the same letters, qu-. This is not a coincidence, as they are cognates derived from the Proto-Indo-European interrogative pronoun root k w o-, reflected in Proto-Germanic as χ w a-or kh w a-and in Latin as qu-. [citation needed]
In linguistics, wh-movement (also known as wh-fronting, wh-extraction, or wh-raising) is the formation of syntactic dependencies involving interrogative words. An example in English is the dependency formed between what and the object position of doing in "What are you doing?".
This list contains acronyms, initialisms, and pseudo-blends that begin with the letter W.. For the purposes of this list: acronym = an abbreviation pronounced as if it were a word, e.g., SARS = severe acute respiratory syndrome, pronounced to rhyme with cars
This occurred with the word how in the Old English period, and with who, whom and whose in Middle English (the latter words having had an unrounded vowel in Old English). Reduction to /w/ , a development that has affected the speech of the great majority of English speakers, causing them to pronounce wh- the same as w- (sometimes called the ...