Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2019 June 3

Language desk
< June 2	<< May | June | Jul >>	June 4 >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Language Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

June 3

Wh = F in Maori

Scunthorpe problem says In 2008, the filter of the free wireless service of the town of Whakatane in New Zealand blocked searches involving the town's own name because the filter's phonetic analysis deemed the "whak" to sound like fuck; the town name is in Maori, and in the Maori language "wh" is most commonly pronounced as "f". The town subsequently put the name on the filter's whitelist. Why would "wh" be used to represent this sound? Latin letters were introduced to Maori by native anglophones familiar with the script's normal use (it's not as if they tried to bring in Cyrillic and misunderstood the letters' normal sound values) recently enough that I'm guessing that the sounds wouldn't have changed significantly in 200ish years. I see from Maori language#Orthography that there is no F in the alphabet, but I don't understand why it couldn't have been introduced with other letters. Nyttend (talk) 23:37, 3 June 2019 (UTC)

From the Wikipedia article Maori language : At least until the 1930s, the bilabial fricative was considered to be the correct pronunciation. The fact that English f gets transcribed as p and not wh in borrowings (for example, "February" becomes Pēpuere instead of *Whēpuere) would strongly hint that the Māori did not perceive English /f/ to be the same sound as their wh. Since the people introducing the script (apparently) noticed this, they seem to have used the most similar other sound, the English "wh" sound (though it's not common now, it was earlier). Edit: "Bilabial fricative" is the native Maori sound (I saw that you don't know the IPA on your user page; no worries). It sounds kinda like blowing air out as if you were trying to cool down your coffee. TotallyNotSarcasm (talk) 00:18, 4 June 2019 (UTC)