Hacker News Reader

Comment by Radim | Hacker News Reader

For people interested in this kind of stuff, Guy Deutscher's book "The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention" is a fun read!

As is the "The History of English" podcast [0], for the more aurally inclined.

On a related note, the Great Vowel Shift [1] of the 14-16th century really fucked English over. Apparently it was a close call back then, English almost kept its "regular", conservative pronunciation ("meet", "boot" like in German), instead of the current idiosyncratic chaos.

Bizarre pronunciation of British proper names like Cholmondeley (pronounced: Chumley!), Worcester or Norwich are another one of my favourites.

[0] http://historyofenglishpodcast.com/page/10/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift

View on HN

"Worcester" and "Norwich" are sort of regular, in the sense that the "ces" in "-cester" suffixes often gets elided into an "s" (e.g. "Gloucester", pronounced "Gloster") and the "w" in "-wick" and "-wich" suffixes is typically dropped completely (e.g. "Greenwich", "Warwick", "Berwick", pronounced "Grennidge", "Worick", "Berick" respectively).

My mother has always insisted that "Cirencester" is correctly pronounced "Sisister", which Wikipedia sort of supports (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cirencester#Pronunciation).

Don't forget Southwark! (Sutherk)

That's interesting because North Berwick, South Berwick, and Berwick in southern Maine are pronounced Ber-wick.

Similarly, Norwich, Connecticut is pronounced Nor-which locally.

Those wacky Nutmeggers (who badly need a standard demonym by the way) also pronounce their local Thames River as thaymz and yes that's with the th as in thick. But they do pronounce Greenwich (CT) as the English do.

I have read (no source at hand though) that that one used to be "Nor-itch" but during the 20th century the pronunciation was gradually forgotten and replaced with a spelling pronunciation. If I remember correctly the same was true of Warwick ("War-ick") Rhode Island.

Same thing happened with Berkeley in the US: originally "Barclay", and still pronounced "Barclay" in the UK.

It's common for us place names to have drifted from their origin.

The Egyptian Cairo is pronounced ky-row but the American is pronounced kay-row.

There's a running joke about the American pronunciation of Loughborough.

Gloucester makes sense if you consider that it's pronounced "Glouce-ster" rather than "Glou-cester". You wouldn't pronounce Glouce as "Glou-se", but to rhyme with "grouse".

I always thought it was pronounced 'glosster' ...

It is, I think GP means it makes sense if you view the syllable break there, and then shorten it and say it quickly because you're lazy and that's what happens.

Yep, exactly, thanks. Mainly my point was "it makes sense if you consdier that the syllable break is after Glouce rather than after Glou".

I was somewhere between baffled and delighted when I discovered that Bicester is pronounced "Bister".

Also Berkeley and Berkshire are pronounced with a "bar" sound in UK English, but "burr" in the US, I believe.

True; and yet the British pejorative "berk" ("fool", "idiot") rhymes with "work" but is supposedly a contraction of "Berkeley Hunt" (rhyming slang for a word much ruder than the fairly mild "berk").

And of course good old Worcestershire sauce, which can be a mouthful if English isn't your first language.

Where I'm from there are probably 3+ common and different ways to pronounce it.

No, it's tough no matter what your first language is, unless you've learned how the locals pronounce it. "Wuster-sher". Easy peasy.

We have a few remnants of the British colonialists here in Kenya. And one such, who has since passed on but was on the news regularly was called Cholmondeley. With the exception of one newscaster, who taught us how to read the name correctly, the rest always mispronounced the name. We also have a well name office block called Warwick Center and I am yet to hear someone dropping the second 'w'. Well, I didn't know that, too, until I met a someone from 'Worick' University.

My favourite is a small town called Towcester - pronounced like "toaster".

Seconding the "History of English" podcast. It's a fascinating subject.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com