Seven Years Teaching English, and I Never Noticed This

September 19, 2026

I just came across this on one of the SM sites, and I've never noticed it before, not in 7 years of TEFLing in CO, not on any of the many websites I've read about TEFLing or English in general: If you replace the "w" in "what" "when" and "where" with a "t" you get the answer to each question. So, that makes me wonder: is this an oddity in English that came about by chance? It must be, languages don't develop by design.

It isn't merely a chance oddity, although the remarkably tidy modern spelling makes it look like one.

English inherited two related sets of words:

Question / Corresponding Answer

what / that

when / then

where / there

whence / thence

whither / thither

The first set points toward something unknown: What thing? When? Where? The second points toward something identified: That thing. Then. There.

This pattern is ancient. In Old English, the pairs looked roughly like this:

hwæt / þæt: what / that

hwær / þær: where / there

hwænne / þænne: when / then

The letter þ, called thorn, represented the "th" sound. Modern what comes from Old English hwæt, while that comes from þæt. Those recorded forms show that the parallel existed at least a thousand years ago.
Bosworth–Toller: hwæt
Bosworth–Toller: þæt

It reaches even farther back into the Germanic and Indo-European ancestry of English. Question words shared an ancient kw-/hw- beginning, while demonstrative words, those pointing to a particular thing, place, or time, shared a t-/th- beginning. The remainder of each word carried the category:

unknown thing versus identified thing

unknown time versus identified time

unknown place versus identified place

You can see the same family resemblance in German:

was / das: what / that

wann / dann: when / then

wo / da: where / there

So nobody sat down and designed the system, but it wasn't a meaningless accident either. Early speakers gradually produced and preserved a regular grammatical pattern, and generations of speakers inherited it. The almost perfect English spelling trick is partly coincidental because pronunciations and spellings changed over the centuries, but the relationship underneath it is genuine.

What surprises me is that it apparently isn't commonly taught in TEFL training classes. It is an excellent little memory device, especially for beginners. Seven years in Colombian TEFLing and the language kept this card up its sleeve. English does enjoy being unnecessarily mysterious.