[a] Semantically speaking, relative words typically refer to some antecedent in the containing phrase or clause.
[2]: 356n, 1074n There are whoso(ever), whomso(ever), whichsoever, whensoever and whatso(ever); and the archaisms whencesoever and whithersoever are still occasionally found.
Although some varieties of American English and various Scottish dialects still preserve the original sound (i.e. [ʍ] rather than [w]), most have only the [w].
[26] The words who, whom, whose, what and why, can all be considered to come from a single Old English word hwā, reflecting its masculine and feminine nominative (hwā), dative (hwām), genitive (hwæs), neuter nominative and accusative (hwæt), and instrumental (masculine and neuter singular) (hwȳ, later hwī) respectively.
[26] The pronunciation of English relative words starting with the ⟨wh⟩ digraph involves a phonetic element historically pronounced as /hw/ and now variously realized as /w/ or /ʍ/.
[30]: 14 Speakers with the whine-wine merger generally use /w/, resulting in words like which, and why being pronounced with an initial /w/ sound, homophonous with witch, and wye.
The /hw/ pronunciation is preserved in conservative speech in the Southern United States,[31] in certain Scottish English varieties,[32] and elsewhere.
[30]: 16 Three factors have been highlighted in enabling this phonetic evolution: spelling, word frequency, and possibly a shift in the sociolinguistic status of the northern pronunciation in some circles in the south during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
[2]: 1049 Fused relatives are easily confused with open interrogatives, and even a careful analysis may conclude that, if taken out of context, a particular sentence can have either of two interpretations.
An example in The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language illustrating this ambiguity is What she wrote is completely unclear.