@contrex,
contrex wrote:
What I did say, and it's there, unedited, for anyone to see, is that I could not imagine the word 'why' and the name of the letter Y sounding different when spoken.
Neither can I, but it may be my association with the lower classes or faulty hearing.
So if I told the two of you "Don't whine", you'd think I was telling you not to consume a drink made from fermented grapes? How odd.
So I went to dictionary.com and looked. The Random House dictionary (American), and it as both /hw/ (first) and /w/ second, and their little pronunciation thingy (click on the loudspeaker symbol) definitely says it with /hw/.
Their world english dictionary (Collins-based, English) only has /w/, (and they don't have a pronunciator for it (I couldn't think of a word for that, so I think I made that one up)(maybe it'd be pronouncer).
I thought of "whinge", a lovely word I got mainly from my Australian-American or America-Australian niece, and I'm pretty sure she pronounced it /hw/, because I knew immediately that it must be "wh" at the start. dictionary.com says it mostly Brit and Oz, and gives both /wh/ and/w/, even tho it's mostly overseas, and the pronouncer (okay, I'll go with that) says /hw/.
Check out the pronunciations if it's still a bit up in the air about what we think we're saying.
w
@MontereyJack,
How do you know whether someone is saying their, there, or they're? I don't suppose you are often confused.
"they're" is usually a bit more two-syllabic than the others are.
I'll be damned, I figured while I was at it, I'd look up "Wycliffe", where this whole thing started, and the pronouncer says it's "wick-lif" (like a candle, and don't tell me you pronounce that some way I've never heard of too), and I'm pretty sure I got "Y-cliff" from someone in some churchly capacity who ought to have known back in my Presbyterian days. So what do we Midwesterners know?
So Joe Nation was right all along.
@MontereyJack,
MontereyJack wrote:
So if I told the two of you "Don't whine", you'd think I was telling you not to consume a drink made from fermented grapes? How odd.
Don't be ridiculous. We deal with homophones every day. We know the difference between wine (non countable noun) and whine (verb) and also how these words are normally used. (Were you serious?)
contrex asks:
Quote: Were you serious?)
Not particularly. I'm rather surprised you haven't noticed that I am quite often less serious than you are.
It also seems to me that you are as surprised that so many of us do in fact differentiate between "why" and "y" as we are that some of you don't. (And it isn't an affectation that we do)(it isn't some NewWorld implementation or extension of your class structure).
@MontereyJack,
Huh . . . i've known about Wycliffe and his considerable historical importance for more than 40 years, but never knew that his name was pronounced in that manner.
