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The pronunciation of the in English has changed over time, and still varies today between different regions and accents. It is now most commonly pronounced , the same as a plain initial , although some dialects, particularly those of Scotland and Ireland, retain the traditional pronunciation , generally realized as , a voiceless "w" sound. The process by which the historical has become in most modern varieties of English is called the wine–whine merger. It is also referred to as glide cluster reduction. Before rounded vowels, a different reduction process took place in Middle English, as a result of which the in words like ''who'' and ''whom'' is now pronounced /h/. (A similar sound change occurred earlier in the word ''how''.) ==Early history== What is now English is thought to have originated as the Proto-Indo-European consonant *''kʷ'' (whose reflexes came to be written in Latin and the Romance languages). In the Germanic languages, in accordance with Grimm's Law, Indo-European voiceless stops became voiceless fricatives in most environments. Thus the labialized velar stop *''kʷ'' initially became presumably a labialized velar fricative *''xʷ'' in pre-Proto-Germanic, then probably becoming – a voiceless labio-velar approximant – in Proto-Germanic proper. The sound was used in Gothic and represented by the symbol known as hwair; in Old English it was spelled as . The spelling was changed to in Middle English, but the pronunciation remained . Because Proto-Indo-European interrogative words typically began with *''kʷ'', English interrogative words (such as ''who'', ''which'', ''what'', ''when'', ''where'') typically begin with (for the word ''how'', see below). As a result, such words are often called wh-words, questions formed from them are called wh-questions, and a common grammatical phenomenon affecting them is called wh-movement, even in reference to languages in which such words do not begin with . 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Pronunciation of English ⟨wh⟩」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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