I know “odd British pronunciations” is a hoary old trope, and we’ve had posts about it before, but I was struck when looking something up in my trusty BBC Pronouncing Dictionary of British Names by the density of names with unpredictable pronunciations on the spread pp. 70-71. Many of them, of course, are easy enough, e.g. Heriot [ˈherɪət] (hérriot), but around half seemed worth reproducing here:
Helwick Shoals and lightship [ˈhelɪk] (héllick)
Hely, f.n. [ˈhilɪ] (heeli)
Helyer, f.n. [ˈhelɪər] (hélli-er)
Heman, f.n. [ˈhimən] (heeman)
Heming, f.n. [ˈhemɪŋ] (hémming)
Hemingbrough [ˈhemɪŋbrʌf] (hémming-bruff)
Hemmerde, f.n. [ˈhemərdɪ] (hémmerdi)
Hene [ˈhinɪ] (heeni)
Heneage, f.n. [ˈhenɪdʒ] (hénnij) Appropriate also for the Barony of ~.
Henebery [ˈhenɪbərɪ] (hénneberi)
Heneghan, f.n. [ˈhenɪgən] (hénnegan)
Heneglwys [henˈegluɪs] (henégloo-iss)
Heneker, fm. [ˈhenɪkər] (hénneker)
Henig, f.n. [ˈhenɪg] (hénnig)
Henlere, f.n. [ˈhenlɪər] (hénleer)
Henriques, f.n. (henˈrikɪz] (henreekez)
Hepburn, f.n. [ˈheb3rn] (hébburn); [ˈhebərn] (hébbŭrn)
Hepburn [ˈheb3rn] (hébbŭrn)
Heppell, f.n. [ˈhepl] (heppl)
Hereford [ˈherɪfərd] (hérreferd) Appropriate also for Viscount ~.
Hergest Ridge [ˈhargɪst] (haargest)
Herklots, f.n. [ˈh3rklɒts] (hérklots)
Herkness, f.n. [ˈharknɪs] (haarkness)
Hermges, f.n. [ˈh3rmdʒiz] (hérmjeez)
Herries, Baron [ˈherɪs] (hérriss)
Herstmonceux, also spelt Hurstmonceux, Hurstmonceaux [ˌh3rstmənˈsju] (herstmo6n-séw); [ˌh3rstmənˈsu] (herst-mon-soo)
Hertford [ˈharfərd] (haarford) Appropriate also for the Marquess of ~.
Hertingfordbury [ˈhartɪŋfərdberɪ] (haartingfordberri)
Hervey, f.n. [ˈharvɪ] (haarvi)
Herwald, f.n. [ˈh3rwəld] (hérwald)
Heseltine, f.n. [ˈhesltain] (héssltin) Also the pronunciation of Peter Warlock, composer, for his nom-de-plume of Philip ~.
Heselton, f.n. [ˈhesltən] (hésslton)
Hesilrige, f.n. [ˈhezɪlrɪdʒ] (hézzilrij)
Hesleden [ˈhesldən] (hésslden)
Hesmondhalgh, f.n. [ˈhezməndhælʃ] (hézmənd-halsh) ; [ˈhezməndhɔ] (hézmond-haw)
Hespe, f.n. [hesp] (hessp)
Hessé, f.n. [ˈhesɪ] (héssi)
Hessle [ˈhezl] (hezzl)
Hethel [ˈhiθl] (heethl) ; [ˈheθl] (hethl)
Heugh, f.n. [hju] (hew)
Heugh, Northumberland [hjuf] (hewf)
Hever [ˈhivər] (heever)
Hewardine, f.n. [ˈhjuərdin] (héw-ardeen)
Heyrod [ˈherəd] (hérred)
Heysham [ˈhiʃəm] (hee-sham)
Heyshott [ˈheɪʃɒt] (hay-shot)
Heythrop [ˈhiθrəp] (heethrop) Appropriate also for the ~ Hunt.
Hibaldstow [ˈhɪblstoʊ] (hibblsto)
High Legh [ˈhaɪ ˈli] (hi lee)
High Wych [ˈhaɪ ˈwaɪtʃ] (hi witch)
High Wycombe [ˈhaɪ ˈwɪkəm] (hi wickem)
Higham, f.n. [ˈhaɪəm] (hi-am)
Higham, East Suffolk, West Suffolk [ˈhaɪəm] (hi-em); [ˈhɪgəm] (higgam)
Higham, Yorks. [ˈhaɪəm] (hi-em); [ˈhɪkəm] (hickam)
Hinchingbrooke, Viscountcy of [ˈhɪnʃɪŋ-brʊk] (hinshing-brook)
Hindolveston, also spelt Hindolvestone [ˈhɪndlˈvestən] (hindlvéston); [ˈhilvistən]
(hilvéston)
Hindsley, f.n. [ˈhaɪndzlɪ] (hindzli)
Hinwick [ˈhɪnɪk] (hinnick)
Hiorns, f.n. [ˈhaɪərnz] (hi-ornz)
Hippisley, f.n. [ˈhɪpslɪ] (hipsli)
Hiron, f.n. [ˈhaɪərɒn] (hiron)
Hirwaun, also spelt Hirwain [ˈhɪərwaɪn] (heerwin); [ˈh3rwɪn] (hirwin)
Hoathly, East and West [hoʊθˈlaɪ] (hoth-li)
Hodder & Stoughton, publishers [ˈhɒdər ənd ˈstautən] (hodder and stowton)
Hodghton, f.n. [ˈhɒdʒtən] (hojton)
Hoenes, f.n. [ˈhoʊnes] (honess)
Hogarth, fm. [ˈhoʊgarθ] (hogaarth); [ˈhɒgərt] (hoggart) The first is traditional for William ~, painter and engraver. The second is usual in Cumberland and Westmorland.
Hoggan, f.n. [ˈhɒgən] (hoggan)
Hoggard, f.n. [ˈhɒgard] (hoggaard)
Hoggarth, f.n. [ˈhɒgərt] (hoggart)
Hogh, f.n. [hoʊ] (ho)
Hoghton, f.n. [ˈhɔtən] (hawton)
Boy, that was a lot more work than I expected — I think I’ve got the bracketed pronunciations right, but the respelled ones in parens are catch-as-catch-can: I haven’t tried to reproduce the breves and what have you. I trust you’ll get the idea.
The only Heneghan I know personally is from Cork and pronounces her name /ˈhinəhən/. OTOH Dublin TD Barry Heneghan is /ˈheinəhən/ which is perhaps somewhat closer to the Irish Ó hÉineacháin.
When Michael Heseltine was in the news I heard it as /ˈhezltain/ but I suppose one hears what one expects.
The 3’s are IPA ɜ, if you want to be typographically correct about it. It’s a slightly more open [ə], or a centralized [ɛ].
Hesmondhalgh and Hoathly are two that completely surprised me.
There’s also “Eddyshaw” [ˈhavərsɪdʒ]. Trips a lot of people up, that one.
Re Helwick, you should try a pint of Smithwicks when you are in Dublin (or better, Kilkenny).
Re first vowel in heneghan, a long vowel would be spelt ee and would come from Irish ao or aoi. Compare Egan (caught you, no ee at beginning of words except for Eeyore, which is a name currently only used for donkeys and perhaps mules!).
Unsurprisingly, for some the two transcriptions contradict each other:
High Wych [ˈhaɪ ˈwaɪtʃ] (hi witch)
Hindolveston(e) […] [ˈhilvistən] (hilvéston)
Hindsley, f.n. [ˈhaɪndzlɪ] (hindzli)
Hiorns, f.n. [ˈhaɪərnz] (hi-ornz)
Hiron, f.n. [ˈhaɪərɒn] (hiron)
Hirwaun, also spelt Hirwain [ˈhɪərwaɪn] (heerwin)
Hodghton, f.n. [ˈhɒdʒten] (hojton)
Most of them could be matters of missing diacritics in the respellings, but not the stress in (the second pronunciation of) Hindolveston(e).
I can easily imagine how “Hinchingbrooke” could be pronounced “Hinshingbrooke” in casual speech and how that could then “stick,” but insisting on it as a shibboleth seems odd. That seems like exactly the right sort of phonological context for free variation and tolerance. Bonus wikipedia content: “Three months after they began dating, the couple spent a weekend on the Isle of Wight and she noticed that his credit cards read ‘Viscount Hinchingbrooke’. Only then did he explain that he was a member of the aristocracy …” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julie_Montagu,_Countess_of_Sandwich
You can see (a later edition of) the dictionary here.
The 3’s are IPA ɜ, if you want to be typographically correct about it.
Yeah, I know, but it was close enough for government work and I was fed up with making niggling little corrections.
Unsurprisingly, for some the two transcriptions contradict each other:
That’s because, as I said, “the respelled ones in parens are catch-as-catch-can: I haven’t tried to reproduce the breves and what have you.” I suppose I should have just omitted them. Trust the IPA. (That “hilvéston,” for instance, is actually hílvĕstŏn. I wasn’t going to bother fixing all those OCR errors for a respelling.)
@DM: I don’t think “hindzli” contradicts; my intuition tells me that a naive English speaker reading that will think of the word hind and say it correctly with /aɪ/. (But how, then, would you use phonetic respelling to convey an alternative pronunciation with /ɪ/? You can’t.)
Also, “hiron” doesn’t really contradict; it’s consistent with how words like chyron, thyroid or biro would be pronounced in conservative RP. A speaker who said those without /ə/ would presumably do the same with this name.
glad to know that the city in texas should properly be spelt Gandolvestone!
As an Englishman, I only the following ones odd:
Hemingbrough
Hepburn
Hesmondhalgh
Heugh as ‘hewf’
High Wych
Higham x 3 inconsistencies
Hinchingbrooke
Hodghton
Hoenes
Hoghton
That’s twelve out of 72, or one-sixth. As someone once said, I get weirder things free with my breakfast cereal.
Some fall into a different category, as for example
Heneglwys – ‘old church’ in standard Welsh, and the pronunciation given is a fair anglicisation.
Hirwaun is also Welsh, and again the pronunciation given is a fair anglicisation.
Names ending in ‘wick’ are regularly pronounced as if ending in ‘ick’.
My mother, brought up in the Cotswolds, told me that the local pronunciation of Ebrington was Yubberton, which sounds strange at first but is quite a normal development.
‘Heugh’ as ‘hewf’ is odd to me but not *that* odd – it’s ‘heuch’ with the [x] sound on this side of the border, so it’s another reasonable variant.
What is ‘f.n.’?
@Jen in Edinburgh, f.n. stands for family name.
LPD has the following note:
(i) = [ˈhɑː fəd], (ii) = [ˈhɑːt-], (iii) [ˈhɜːt-]
The pronunciation dictionary edited by Clive Upton and William Kretzschmar (originally OUP, then Routledge) doesn’t mention the t-less pronunciation at all.
You would think keeping the /t/ in “Hertford” might also help minimize confusion with “Hereford,” although there are also vowel differences to help there. Since each of those -fords is also the name of a shire, it’s a more-important-than-average pair to disambiguate.
Is impossible to predict whether a name ending -tham has /təm/ or /θəm/ . The latter must often be a spelling pronunciation
As an Englishman, I only the following ones odd:
Well, yeah, you’re used to most of them. If you lived next door to Hepburn, you’d be used to hébburn. The point is that if you’re not used to them, there’s no way to know whether “wick” has /w/ or not, whether “s” is /s/ or /z/, etc.; “not *that* odd” isn’t relevant — nothing is odd if you know where it came from or why it’s the way it is. The pronunciation of a Czech (say) name isn’t odd no matter your state of ignorance.
I mean, you can look at “Helyer, f.n. [ˈhelɪər] (hélli-er)” and say “Sure, that makes perfect sense” — but you’d say exactly the same if it were “Helyer, f.n. [ˈheljər] (héllyer).” The point is not whether the actual pronunciation “makes sense” but whether you can predict it.
And some of this is just random spelling variants. “Herkness” is transparently a variant of the rather more common “Harkness” and is pronounced the same. It seems plausible that Harkness emerged historically as the dominant spelling precisely because it matches the pronunciation and only a few oddballs resisted standardization/rationalization in that regard.
Sure, but again, if you know you know, if you don’t you have no way of knowing. (Not that I object, mind you — life would be so boring if everything were predictable!)
As someone born and brought up in Hertfordshire I have never heard the “Harford” pronunciation, although obvs it’s “Hartfordshire” wiv a tee (or a gentle glottal stop…).
In the interests of balance, may I suggest Rheims, as in “the Douai-Rheims Bible”. I’d bet 9 out of ten get that wrong, just as I did until last year…
Ah, I didn’t get that OCR was involved, too!
How is it pronounced?
(Within French, Reims /ræ̃s/ is regular, but what horrors might lurk in English?)
/riːmz/ is what the pronunciation dictionaries say.
Wiktionary says (for English): (traditional) /ɹiːmz/, (gallicized) /ɹæms/. Of course, if nine out of ten get it “wrong” but are all wrong the same way, they are not, in fact, wrong. Whatever ones theological views of the D-Rh Bible translation, there is no Pope of Pronunciation.
there is no Pope of Pronunciation
He would be fighting for primacy with the Emperor of Elocution.
Don’t forget the Sultan of Sandhi.
The Douai/Douay part is the odd one. OED gives BrE /ˈduːeɪ/, /ˈdaʊeɪ/ AmE /duˈeɪ/. Longmans says (I paraphrase, hopefully correctly) BrE ˈdaʊ i, ˈduːi, ˈdaʊeɪ, AmE duːˈeɪ, but the place in France is BrE ˈduːeɪ, AmE duːˈeɪ —Fr [dwe, du e].
the Emperor of Elocution
the Sultan of Sandhi
The Pharaoh of Phonetics (Lord Ladefoged.)
The Akond of Acoustics.
“Of course, if nine out of ten get it “wrong” but are all wrong the same way, they are not, in fact, wrong.”
A noble principle, to be sure, but it depends where you are, and what you are doing. Yes, most English speakers will say “Reemz”, and we are surely right! But travelling in France you’ll need to ask for directions to /ʁɛ̃s/, or be very wrong. Although it’s true the French are famously tolerant of our mispronunciations.
The Dey of Discourse and the Sebastokrator of Semantics. (Of the Silentiarios of Syntax we do not speak.)
(The Akond moonlights in Aktionsart.)
“Mrs. Dr. dear, can you tell me if R-h-e-i-m-s is Rimes or Reems or Rames or Rems?”
“I believe it’s really more like ‘Rhangs,’ Susan.”
“Oh, those French names,” groaned Susan.
The Maharaja of Morphology.
All these mighty rulers are allies against the dark empire of the Mekon of Merge.
I assume that BBC announcers who have occasion to mention R[h]eims don’t attempt to say it in French, which would be embarrassing for all concerned. They probably have some sort of cheat sheet that recommends one of the competing English pronunciations of the word.
If you want to get exotic, why stop at French? Japanese wikipedia tells me the place is named ランス (=ransu in usual transliteration).
In Russian it’s Реймс /reims/.
Ρενς in the Septuagint.
Oh dear. I’ve been mispronouncing the name of that Mike Oldfield album for years now. I’ll have to try to work the correct pronunciation into conversation as soon as possible.
Interestingly, “ransu” is a lot closer to the French version (which the French themselves don’t seem to consider “exotic” at all, bizarrely).
The aforementioned “BBC Pronouncing Dictionary of British Names” is produced by the BBC’s Pronunciation Unit, of course, and a cheat sheet of sorts. Sadly, the Unit doesn’t seem to exert much authority over non-British names, as displayed by the competing versions of Myanmar used by newsreaders and journalists. There was even a reference to the “Bayou Tapestry” recently. Who knew?
Whether one should actually listen to Mike Oldfield albums is a highly personal decision to be made in consultation with ones own advisers and/or medical professionals, but the album he did after _Hergest Ridge_ has an interesting language-related backstory to its title that Hattics might enjoy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ommadawn#Album_title_and_lyrics
Names, of course, are under the rule of the Overlord of Onomastics.
Make way, you contemptible clitics, for the King of Constructions and Despot of Determiners, your Suprasegmental Sovereign! Tremble at his C-Command!
To think I was once in line to be Hospodar of Historical Linguistics…
Don’t forget the three impostors, the Dictator of Discourse, the Usurpator of Usage, and the Tyrant of Tones.
“As an Englishman, I only the following ones odd:
Well, yeah, you’re used to most of them.”
I’m not at all used to most of them. I concede that I would not have been able to predict some of them. But the pronunciation of final -wick is very often -ick, as in Flitwick and Alnwick. My only dissent is with the use of some these examples as ‘odd British pronunciations’ to use your own phrase. Predictability is a different matter from oddness.
The entry for Heseltine has the composer’s names swapped; his real name was Philip Arnold Heseltine, and his compositions were published under the name Peter Warlock.
If a name’s pronunciation need only be unpredictable from the spelling (rather than seemingly at variance with it), this is not specifically a British thing. There are plenty of American placenames whose local pronunciation is unpredictable from the spelling, or indeed different from what an English-speaker would expect.
According to wikipedia, the surname of the quondam Brit politician Michael Heseltine (now the Rt Hon the Lord Heseltine following his time in the House of Commons) is pronounced /ˈhɛzəltaɪn/. This is consistent with, although I suppose not required by, informal references to him as “Hezza.”
Michael Heseltine
Formally, “Tarzan the Mace-Wielder.”
(Ah me! Those were the days! Labour backbenchers singing The Red Flag in the Commons chamber! Ubi sunt?)
My only dissent is with the use of some these examples as ‘odd British pronunciations’ to use your own phrase. Predictability is a different matter from oddness.
Ah, excellent point — I should have worded my intro more carefully.
this is not specifically a British thing. There are plenty of American placenames whose local pronunciation is unpredictable from the spelling
Very true.
Rosie said:
There are plenty of American placenames whose local pronunciation is unpredictable from the spelling.
Hear, hear! Poughkeepsie and Boise are two that spring to mind.
As a Brit, I didn’t know all of those. I know of Heysham as a ferry port, but would hesitate over the pronunciation. Heneglwys is Welsh for ‘old church’ (‘eglwys’ as in the French ‘église’ – ‘w’ is a vowel in Welsh.) The H name that I find counterintuitive is Hindley; I want to pronounce the first syllable like the female deer (no, not ‘doe’!), but it’s ‘i’ as in ‘pin’.
One has to become a serial killer if one is called Myra Hindley. People always pronounce either one’s first name or surname (or both) incorrectly, inducing a murderous rage in one.
My surname is virtually never spelt correctly by those who have not been explicitly instructed in the True Way, and my wife’s given name is inscrutable to the English (and Welsh.) She has long been accustomed to spelling her name out letter by letter in its entirety on the telephone. Yet she has not (yet) succumbed to her serial-killer destiny. I think. I will stand by her if she does.
Poughkeepsie does lack the transparent orthography of e.g. Schenectady. (Those are both indigenous-etymology toponyms where the original latin-script spellings were done by the Dutch and perhaps not the most scholarly among them, although from rather different indigenous languages.)
It occurs to me that I am not sure how these compare: the number of English-speaking Catholics and the population of France. Even more fifty or sixty years ago, before the Jerusalem Bible, when maybe that would be the determiner.
That only requires /ˈhɛ/-; compare Jeremy > Jezza.
I forgot:
Would hinnd work? Or would it just give people a Blue Screen of Death?
(Or hinn’d for a proper 16th-century feeling.)
Of course if it were “Hintley” you’d assume the KIT vowel rather than the PRICE one by analogy to “hinterland” or rhymes like “lint” and “dint.” I assume there’s a historical reason why those have KIT while hind, kind, rind etc. have PRICE …
Regular vowel lengthening in late Old English* before “homorganic clusters” (voiced only, AFAIK: nd, ld, mb; not ng, though) – hind, rind, grind, kind, child, wild, mild, field, climb, comb just off the top of my head. Almost all of these have cognates on the continent that have the expected short vowels (and are often spelled the same).
Thumb lacks it because its b is fake; would & should might be destressed & restressed; could has a more complex history in any case and never had a /l/.
* Actually spelled out with accents in a few texts.
Note childish/like but children, brindle, kindle–did this mainly apply to monosyllables? If so, what happened to bomb?
Bomb is a much later French loan word, so it was not affected by an Old English sound change.
Fake as the “b” in the spelling of “thumb” might be, it rhymes with “dumb,” whose orthographic “b” represents a (now-silent) /b/ going back to Proto-Germanic *dumbaz. Compare also “numb” (“b” supposedly added to the spelling along the way) and “plumb” (“b” was supposedly in the Old-French source), all of which likewise rhyme with “dumb.”
Peter Warlock
presumably prounced identically to “patrick”.
I can’t explain dumb specifically, but the descriptions in Wikipedia (1, 2) mention the existence of later shortening processes…
Also, it turns out ng did lengthen; that’s why long isn’t lang anymore, except in Scotland, where “the shortening occurred first”.
English-specific shortening processes would explain thumb (German Daumen, with a *long vowel and no *b). Numb is indeed fake (G benommen, base verb nehmen).
Plumb is a later loan. I wouldn’t even be surprised if it’s from closer to 1466 than to 1066.
My CD edition of the OED has quotations from about 1300 (spelled plum and plomme); I don’t know if the online OED has predated that.
There are a bunch of “plumb” entries; I presume we’re talking about plumb ‘A ball or piece of lead or other dense substance, attached to a plumb line or quadrant for determining the vertical,’ for which the first citation is:
Maybe now, but when I was at the neighbouring college (Wadham) in the 1960s the t-less pronunciation was universal.
Incidentally, did your source really spell it as “superceded”?
No, that was my error. Shows you cannot manually copy even a small text without errors…
Even if you speak French, Reims is probably the most difficult place of any importance in France to get right.
Of course, they’re not even consistent. In crême de cassis the final s is pronounced; in the town of Cassis, the next port to where I live, it is silent. Qu’a vist Paris e noun Cassis a ren vist — those who’ve seen Paris but not Cassis have seen nothing.
For those of you on the western side of the Atlantic, Stokenham, in Devon, is a name to treasure. It is spoken in the way you will find natural, with the -ham fully pronounced, not as most people elsewhere in England assume. The name is parsed as Stoke-in-Ham, where Ham refers to the district called the South Hams.
That’s a good one. What always gets me is the place names with infixed -le-, which is pronounced “lee,” even though I want to make it a schwa. (Can’t think of an example at the moment, but you know what I mean.)
Near Durham is Chester-le-Street /ˈtʃɛstəlistriːt/
When she embarks on her killing spree I hope she will be less sadistic about it than Myra Hindley.
Some people (especially in Devon), pronounce the “bow” in my name to rhyme with “how”; others (especially in Greater Manchester), to rhyme with “low”. It doesn’t bother me either way, and I’ve never been tempted to get out my gun to enforce one pronunciation rather than the other. We are from Devon, not from Greater Manchester, but my great-grandmother thought that the “how” pronunciation was “common”, and she insisted that it be changed.
The name Bowden is common both in Devon and Greater Manchester, but much less in between, so it almost certainly arose independently in the two regions. The other half of my surname looks as if it comes from Cornwall, but it doesn’t: it comes from Devon. Nowadays it exists in Cornwall, but it isn’t native to Cornwall. (Compare Devenish, which is found in Dorset and Somerset, not in Devon.)
Incidentally the vowel in “low” is not a diphthong (/oʊ/) in Manchester, but a lengthened o (/o:/).
It’s not red any more: the workers’ flag is palest pink; it’s not as red as you may think.
I’m a bit out of touch with modern British politics. Are there still any socialists in the Labour Party along the lines of Denis Skinner (“the Beast of Bolsover”)?
In France the socialist party is led by a nonentity, and left has been taken over by La France Insoumise, whose members range from the unappealing to the nasty. However, there is still a communist party to vote for if you’re desperate.
Just one?
(25 years ago they had 3 Trotskyist and 2 Stalinist parties.)
It’s the kind of name people get after they immigrate somewhere else. Österreicher, Ashkenaziy…
Near Durham is Chester-le-Street /ˈtʃɛstəlistriːt/
Thanks!
Exactly. Men who moved from Cornwall to Devon around the time surnames were becoming usual in England (15th century or earlier) tended to acquire the name Cornish. The earliest ancestor I know of with that name (Robert Cornyshe, 1495–1562) already owned land and lived in Devon, so presumably the name didn’t start with him.
@Athel: Even if you speak French, Reims is probably the most difficult place of any importance in France to get right.
I don’t know about people who speak French, but I had to be told that that Brest rhymes with est, not est. The ones that end in x and z are also unclear. I’m guessing Morlaix (assuming it counts as “any importance”) doesn’t rhyme with Aix, and I feel sure Metz and Biarritz have final /ts/.
ETA: Btw, I suppose it would be hard to tell whether you’re related to Robertson Davies’s characters Francis and Arthur Cornish (whose family had moved back to Cornwall, it appears). I do like his “Cornish trilogy”, especially What’s Bred in the Bone.
I feel sure Metz and Biarritz have final /ts/.
Metz has it in English but not in French (where it’s [mɛs], and an inhabitant is a Messin); Biarritz does have /ts/, probably because it’s Basque.
Thanks. I should have known it was too easy.
Chester-le-Street was the topic of languagehat’s 2006 post about the BBC PRONUNCIATION BLOG. However, as the comments on the linked BBC site (which is still there, good for them) point out, that blog (which gave the pronunciation of “le” like “lee”, as in the comments above) was not consistent with their own Pronouncing Dictionary, which transcribes the “le” as IPA /lɪ/ rather than /li/.
I think probably the dictionary edition at Y’s link (1990, edited by Graham Pointon) represented a conservative RP without happY-tensing — it also puts /ɪ/ at the end of their IPA transcriptions of e.g. Abberley, Alderley, Alderney (some random picks from the A’s), or from the post, Hely, Hervey, Hindsley, Hippisley. But by 2006, Catherine Sangster at the BBC must have been taking happY-tensing for granted.
From the Wikipedia talk page:
As for the origin of the name, marie-lucie had some thoughts:
Thanks!
Also Thornton-le-Beans, mentioned here.
Oh, there’s a last name Hipsley.
In this podcast (about the Cambridge Handbook of Morphology), a U.S. interviewer pronounces (0:22) and mispronounces (0:43) the surname Hippisley, and its bearer pronounces it (0:52).
Maybe that’s all thats required, but Jeremy as an example is a bit misleading. /-Vr/ to /-Vz(ə)/ is very consistent, and in Australian at least I’d expect Hezza to be more likely from herring or Herold, although I understand the British have a few examples where -zza has come from /z/ or /s/.
I would have spontaneously pronounced “Poughkeepsie” exactly the way that WP tells me is correct, though it is possible that I have unwittingly acquired the correct pronunciation somehow from hearing it spoken, despite having no recollection of this.
Alternatively, my feeling for such things may have been enhanced by growing up familiar with toponyms like “Milngavie” and “Kirkcudbright.”
On the other hand, while the pronunciation of the topical toponym “Punxsutawney” offers no difficulty, I doubt whether I could actually spell the name without cheating. In fact, I find some difficulty spelling it even when it’s right in front of me.