Hwy is this funny? As it turns out, there is an intriguing linguistic story behind the gag. One which unites historical linguistics and international crunkstar Lil Jon.
In the ancestor language(s) to English and the other Indo-European languages, WH words come from a *kw sound that is now written with a QU in English. In many languages, such as Latin, this original pronunciation never changed. This is why the Latin version of the WH question words “who” and “what” are “qui” and “quid.”
In the Germanic languages, however, the K-sound in *kw became first a harsh breathy sound (as in the Scottish “loCH”) and eventually a plain ole' H-sound. (This is part of Grimm's Law which we discussed in our history of the word "Fox") Thus “what” was pronounced “hwat.” Around the Middle Ages the order of the letters, but not the order of the sounds, was switched from HW to WH, which is the spelling we continue to use today.
The next chapter of this story is what (hwat?) we hyphen-happy linguists call the "Wine-Whine Merger." That is, to most English speakers "wine" (rotten grape juice) and "whine" (emo lyrics) sound exactly the same. There is a technical question here, whether the WH words lost their H-sound or whether the HW-sound disappeared and was replaced by the W-sound, but that's best left for the professionals to determine.
"Wine" and "whine" are pronounced the same in most dialects of English, but not in Scotland or Ireland. It turns out the details of this merger is a little more complex in the United States, where the merger is almost complete except for parts of the South and some pockets in the Upper Midwest and the West. You can read more about it, as well as the pronounciation of wh-words in Japanglish in this LanguageLog post.
The map of where this difference between W and WH is still pronounced shows that Atlanta, the hometown of a Lil Jon, is within its borders. Which (hwich?) may explain the following:
HWAT!!
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