Re[2]: Whore [was: [tied] Re: Brugmann's Law]

At 6:08:35 PM on Friday, January 18, 2008, Piotr Gasiorowski
wrote:

> On 2008-01-18 23:47, Mate Kapović wrote:

>> Anyway, /h/ is probably due to /hw/ > /h/ in front of an
>> /o/, similar to <who> being [hu:] (but <what> [hwOt]).
>> Labiovelars tend to loose their labial component in front
>> of rounded vowels, it happens in Germanic, Greek,
>> Latin...

> But there was no *w in PGmc. *xo:raz 'adulterer' and
> *xo:ro:(n)- 'whore'. The <wh> spelling of Modern English
> is clearly secondary. In Even the Middle English spelling
> is <ho(o)r(e)>, occasionally <h(o)ure>, but NEVER anything
> beginning with <hw> or <wh>.

The sporadic substitution of /hw/ for /h/ before /O:/
appears in the 15th c., if I remember correctly, though I
also seem to remember that the earliest OED example for this
word is from the 16th c. I believe that <whole> and <whore>
are the only two words in which the spelling took root,
though for a time it was not uncommon in some others, and I
believe that there are (or used to be) some dialect
pronunciations in /hw/ or /w/ of words that historically had
/h/.

Brian