Re: Vwikings.

--- In cybalist@..., markodegard@... wrote:

> I watched a TV program about Vikings. They had soundbyte of an
> Greenlandic Inuit historian (with the last name Olsen). He

pronounced

> it 'Vwikings'.
>
> I'm not making fun of his accent. It's just that I find the
> word-intial Vw combination very easy; fw is just as easy. But no
> English word I know of has them.
>
> The point of this post is that there are lots of clear, distinct
> sounds a native-speaker of English can easily produce, but there

are

> few or no words using these sounds. Bw/pw is another example.
>
> With small children, L and R often comes out as W (with wots of wip
> wounding). I wonder if this has acted as a contraint on such sounds
> arising.

If mr. Olsen's first language was Danish, what you heard might have
been a Danish /v/, laxer then the English counterpart (just about
everything is lax in Danish).

Torsten