Of the digraphs of the second row little need be said. With one exception they are rarely used. BH, DH, KH, and ZH are English renderings of the aspirated consonants of Asiatic languages. LH is a legacy from the Anglo-Saxon. NH is Portuguese. In RH the H is excessively useless; it is disregarded, and the R remains unchanged. That man deserved to have his name recorded who first invented the h of “rhyme.” He will have traced a technical connection between rime and “rhythm;” and will have followed the latter to its Greek source (ῥυθμος). His next act, the insertion of rime’s apparently lost h, will have seemed to him one only of mere reparative justice. His excellent motives and his perspicacity might have met the admiration of posterity, had not his etymology been so egregiously faulty, and the word rime, a direct descendant of the Saxon rim, and as independent of a Greek as of a Cherokee origin. But the h he inserted is there still, and cannot be cast off by any daring iconoclast without an outcry being raised in its behalf by alarmed traditionists: for our orthographical creed is derived from our forefathers, impressed with the accumulated evidences of their quaint blunders, their venerable ignorance, and admirable errors of judgment, all to be assiduously copied by each of us their descendants, as an alternative to being scouted for bad spellers. Thus it is that things originating in a weakness or perverse use of the reasoning faculties of an ancestor, may grow to be regarded as a virtue in a descendant.
WH.
Our attention may now advert to the perfect digraph WH.
Alexander Gill, a contemporary of Shakespeare, and Head Master of St Paul’s Schools, wrote, “W, aspiratum, consona est, quam scribunt per wh, et tamen aspiratio præcedit.” (W, aspirated, is a consonant which is written wh, and yet the Aspirate precedes it.) Dr Lowth (1710–1787), Bishop of London, is quoted by Mr Walker as having directed that WH should be pronounced “HW,” this having been the relative positions of the letters during the Anglo-Saxon period. The erudite theory of the great Hebrew and Saxon scholar had a fascination for the theoretical orthoepist of whom Mr Cull, F.S.A., the learned editor of Ogilvie’s Dictionary, writes:—
Mr Walker did not profess to record the current pronunciation of his day, but he sought to establish principles and even rules to govern the pronunciation; and would change the pronunciation of words to bring them within his rules.
It is probable that Dr Lowth, who, practically, is the responsible author of this theory of inversion, was led to his conclusions as much by his belief that W was a vowel as by the historical considerations alluded to above. As regards W being always a vowel, Dr Lowth’s argument was successfully refuted by Walker himself, whose statements in this respect, Posterity has endorsed. W is a vowel only when forming the latter half of a diphthong. And, moreover, even if the W were a vowel, Dr Lowth could have shewn no good reason for inverting the order of letters in pronouncing the digraph WH. The retrospective influence of a post-aspirate has no power to produce a breathing on a vowel, or on a consonant; but generally to cause a vowel to terminate in a jerked breath (h‘) or a consonant to become unvocalised. And again; that Anglo-Saxon writers had been wont to twist H round to the fore, was an irrelevant fact, and one that ought to have had no weight with the worthy bishop or with Mr John Walker when engaged in dictating laws of pronunciation to the English lieges of King George III. When Walker wrote the following sentence concerning Dr Johnson, he was in truth constructing a formula for his own epitaph:—
His Dictionary has been deemed lawful plunder for every subsequent lexicographer; and so servilely has he been copied, that his mistakes re-appear in several other dictionaries.
And so it is that Mr Walker’s second-hand rule with regard to WH has retained the implicit allegiance of all his successors who have had pronouncing dictionaries to compile. In the presence of such massive authority, to speak is to be silenced, and to differ is to be crushed. But still, as is seen in many things, the most imposing and august array of venerable doctrine cannot always stifle the “still small voice” of a contrary conviction. Who shall say that Dr Primrose had not been looking over a collection of pronouncing dictionaries, when he remarked that, as ten millions of circles can never make a square, so the united voice of myriads cannot lend the smallest foundation to the untrue.
A purpose of this treatise is to respectfully solicit of modern authorities a reconsideration of the doctrine of transposition or dictum relative to the WH; and at the same time to lay certain data before the general reader.
Clear notions concerning the ordinary W are necessary to a proper appreciation of that variety occurring in WH.