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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 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 ...
Other closely related languages, however, have less interrelated ways of forming wh-questions with separate lexemes for each of these wh-pronouns. This includes Wardaman , which has a collection of entirely unrelated interrogative stems: yinggiya 'who', ngamanda 'what', guda 'where', nyangurlang 'when', gun.garr-ma 'how many/what kind'.
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]
It is, however, recognized and maintained in the spelling of some old names, reflecting an earlier German spelling standard, and in some modern loan words. In all cases, it is pronounced /ʋ/. The first edition of the Kalevala had its title spelled Kalewala. In Danish, Norwegian and Swedish, w is named double-v and not double-u. In these ...
kv is used for /k wh / in some dialects of Zhuang. kw is used in various languages for the labialized velar consonant /kʷ/, and in Dene Suline (Chipewyan) for /k wh /. Used informally in English for phonemic spelling of qu, as in kwik (from quick), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European */ɡʷ/.
The spelling indicates the insertion of /ᵻ/ before the /z/ in the spelling - es , but does not indicate the devoiced /s/ distinctly from the unaffected /z/ in the spelling - s . The abstract representation of words as indicated by the orthography can be considered advantageous since it makes etymological relationships more apparent to English ...
A pronunciation respelling for English is a notation used to convey the pronunciation of words in the English language, which do not have a phonemic orthography (i.e. the spelling does not reliably indicate pronunciation). There are two basic types of pronunciation respelling: