I have no problem reading text that uses these characters, but hƿich and hƿile really bother me.
They are weirder ones for sure since they look like Ps without extra training. But just slapping two Vs or Us together like the Romans is a hack compared to the historic ƿ (from Runic ᚹ).
But even stranger is why on Earth were “hw” flipped by printing press folks after hundreds of years with the h first due to pronunciation… I wouldn’t be surprised if the voiceless labial–velar fricative went out of fashion based the new spelling to where many (maybe most) speakers don’t differentiate between “w” & “wh”.
I was talking about the beginning “h”, not the ƿ. Because there are people who pronounce it like that.
I know—but they used to spell the h first too. Almost everyone used to pronounce it ʍ as well, hence my theory that the pronunciation stopped after the wild choice to do a spelling reform
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_labial–velar_fricative
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin-script_digraphs#W
