silas of trees

so i don't know exactly why (or hwy) i got onto this topic this morning, but i decided to look into the etymological origins of the "wh" digraph, for words like "what", "when", etc

so first of all, the digraph used to be "hw", which explains the h-first pronunciations we've all probably heard. my dad pronounces them with the h first, apparently a common thing in the Southeastern United States. there's a shift called the "wine-whine merger" that explores the verbal pronunciation change, but that started me wondering as to how the digraph switched from hw to wh. the answer is, as is often the case, material history and in particular

Norman French

basically, it was just decided to match the pattern of other digraphs such as ch, sh, th. that's all. human want thing match pattern. and thus we switched it to "wh", and that probably contributed to the change in pronunciation.

further more well cited reading on this topic:

• University of Pennsylvania's Language Log post on the subject
• Grant Hutchinson, a rando who put a lot of effort into a post on this last year
• Wikipedia article on the wine-whine merger

what's up gamers, i literally just now realized that the surgeon general and attorney general are two different jobs

Those words are also a remnant of England's administrative language once being Anglo-Norman French, which is why the noun and adjective are reversed. Like blood royal, lieutenant general, heir apparent, court martial, etc.

Also Anglo-Norman French and the influence of older Norman French pronunciation in general are the reason why British English pronunciations of French loanwords sound wrong to Americans (and probably the French)- they aren't intentionally fucking up the French pronunciation of "ballet" or whatever, it's just that they got the loanwords at an earlier time before the standardization of Modern French so they didn't adopt the modern pronunciations.