wine-whine merger
noun/wɑenˈwɑen ˌmɜːdʒə(ɹ)//waɪnˈwaɪn ˌmɜːdʒə(ɹ)/UK/waɪnˈʍaɪn ˌmɝdʒɚ/US
Definitions
A merger in which [ʍ] (the voiceless sound heard at the beginning of the word whine in a…
A merger in which [ʍ] (the voiceless sound heard at the beginning of the word whine in a Scottish accent or several accents in the United States) becomes [w] (the sound heard at the beginning of the word wine); in accents where this merger occurs, whine and wine are homophones.
- As was the case with the wine–whine merger, date from the early twentieth century show that southeastern Pennsylvania was subject to patterns of variation in pronunciation.
- Chambers (2002) graphs the trajectory of the wine-whine''' merger in four reigions preserving ʍ.
- In Scottish English, the so-called wine-whine''' merger did not take place, in which historical Old and Middle English /hw/ was replaced by /w/[.]
The neighborhood
Vish — recursive loop
No curated loop yet for wine-whine merger. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.
sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA