The original sound was a KW as in the Latin equivalents Quis, Quod, Quando, Ubi (for *Cubi) and Cur.
Hhhwhhy do people say their hhhwHhoo, hwHat, hwHen, hwHere, and hwHys like that? Sunday, December 29, 2013 @ 7:02pm
Every K became an H in all the Germanic languages around 500 BC. But the Norman French scribes who took over the writing of English after 1066 had never heard the combination HW and stared writing it WH instead. That was no help in keeping up the traditional pronunciation but had little immediate impact on a society where only the clergy were literate. However, the initial H was eventually lost in all the other Germanic languages except Icelandic and (at least in writing) Danish. I do not quite know when dropping the H began in English, but I would suppose sometime in the early 19th century. Neverthless, a century later, when I was growing up in the 1930s in Greater London, my teacher reproved any of us who mispelled whales or wheel or which with not knowing how to pronounce such words. In the 1960s the mark on a TV game show depended on whether Wine and Whine were pronounced the same and when the chairman appealed to the studio audience, the vast majority agreed that they were not homonyms. Nowadays, however, it is only in Northern England, Scotland and parts of North America where this H is still regularly pronounced.
