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

except it's weirder than that. i was watching an anime that used the word "hydra" at one point and the japanese pronunciation sounds like "hidora", so that was my first tip off to this connection- but you probably are wondering, why the "g" sound at the beginning?

the running theory is that they were using the russian for hydra, which is written Гидра, and pronounced like so: https://forvo.com/word/%D0%B3%D0%B8%D0%B4%D1%80%D0%B0/

the idea is that they used russian because part of the inspiration for the monster most likely comes from a japanese translation of the soviet fantasy film, Ilya Muromets specifically, the design and name appear to be inspired by the three headed dragon that shows up in the film. so, that seems like a pretty clear throughline- but to really drive home the connection, this dragon is called Zmey Gorynych, which was translated to "King Dragon" (or キング・ドラゴン). so they not only got inspiration for the monster design and the hydra name through this source, but this explains why Ghidorah is specifically King Ghidorah.

this tohokingdom thread seems to be one of the first places to popularize the connections:

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.