How 'wh' became 'f'

My friend Ruth commented on one of my posts with an interesting question, which lead me to an interesting answer, so I thought I would share it.

Ruth asked about the Nationality of the people who first used an alphabet to turn Maori into a written language. Part of the reason for her question was that she wondered how it came to be that ‘f’ would be written as ‘wh.’

Here is what I found:

I read that British missionaries to the Maori were the first people to try to write the language down. They lived among the Maori, and early in the interactions between Maori and British, the majority of people (Maori or not) who lived in NZ spoke Maori.

As for the ‘wh,’ it turns out that it is a bit of a confusing issue, and came to be because Maori had a phoneme that English didn’t. In traditional Maori, ‘wh’ is the “voiceless” version of the ‘w’ sound. It is pronounced by blowing out air quickly between your tightly pursed lips. If you try it, it kind of sounds a bit like an ‘f’ sound, but not exactly. It is hard for us Anglophones to pronounce it, since it is not a sound we have heard or tried to make, but for the Maori it was natural. Apparently, both sounds were written as ‘w’ at first, but then when a distinction was made, the voiceless one was written ‘wh,’ which was the best way the Anglophone recorders could find to record that sound with the English alphabet. That reminds me of the ‘w’/’wh’ distinction in English, which is based in mouth/air difference, and not in auditory difference at all. As a kid, I remember feeling with my hand whether or not there was a puff of air when I said a word to know whether or not there was an ‘h’.

Anyway, over time, with the increasing use of English in Maori populations, the voiceless ‘wh’ sound has shifted to being a full English ‘f’ sound, but it is still spelled ‘wh.’ I read that some people are frustrated by this, and try to sustain the traditional pronunciation, but so far, I have only heard the ‘f’ version.

Does that make sense? Pretty neat, I think. Thanks for asking that question, Ruth. Otherwise I might not have learned that!