I know some of you will complain that this site is amateurish and doesn’t use IPA, but I don’t care — I’m a sucker for these things (North Carolina, Colorado, Wyoming, UK), and I can’t resist passing them along. So herewith please find Pronunciation of Suffolk place names; some particularly unexpected or entertaining ones:
Alpheton is Al-fee-t’n, with the stress on the middle syllable.
Athelington can be Al-ing-t’n, but most Suffolkers call it Ath-ling-t’n.
Bramfield is Bram-feeld and Brampton is Bram-pt’n, but Bramford is Brar-m-f’d!
Bures is Bew-ers, but Suffolkers tend to call it Boo-ers.
Chelmondiston is as it looks, but the stress is on the third syllable.
Cowlinge is Koo-linj
Halesworth is as it looks, but becomes Harls-w’th in the local accent!
Heveningham can be Henning’m, but is more often Hay-v’ning’m or Hev-ning’m
Hoxne is Hox-un, rhyming with oxen.
Monewden is Mon-a-d’n
Onehouse is as it looks, but locals call it Wun-uss!
Saxmundham is Sax-mund’m, but, unusually, the stress is on the second syllable.
Thorpe Morieux is Thorp M’roo
Wissington can be Wiss-t’n, more commonly Wissing-t’n these days.
Note to Yanks: The “r” is a lie — for “ar” read “ah.”
Alpheton: Ælfflǣd e tūn ‘Ælfflǣd’s farm’
Bramfield: brōm feld ‘broom-covered open land’
Bramford: brōm ford ‘broom ford’
Brampton: brōm tūn ‘broom farm’
Bures: būr ‘dwellings’
Chelmondiston: Cēolmund es tūn ‘Cēolmund’s farm’
Cowlinge: *Cūl ingas ‘the place of *Cūl’s people’
Halesworth: *Hæl(l)e s worð ‘*Hæle’s (or Hælle’s) enclosure’
Heveningham: Hefa ingas a hām ‘farm of Hefa’s people’
Hoxne: ? ‘(uncertain)’
Saxmundham: *Seaxmund hām ‘*Seaxmund’s farm’
Thorpe Morieux: þorp ‘outlying farm (later of the Morieux family)’
Wissington: Wīgswīþ e tūn ‘Wīgswīþ’s farm’
—
https://keithbriggs.info/Suffolk_place-name_elements_list.html
Re pronunciation, I think some of the stress changes are stress wandering from a weak first syllable to a penult (re Alpheton and Saxmundham, compare Alfredo in Italian or Sigismundo in Spanish, as well as English examples like “upgraded”).
Interesting comparisons!
What’s a “broom ford”? Broom grows on dry land. Fords are in waterways.
Hoxne was recorded earlier as Hoxun. Could it be an abbreviated version of Hoxtun, as in the modern-day Hoxton (which is possibly < the personal name Hocg)?
One marked with brooms to show the best place? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Broomway
But probably just one with broom growing on the banks. There’s generally plenty of dry land around a ford.
The name of Zebila, the main town in the Toende Kusaal area, means “little broom.”
Sabil in Kusaal. The bil part is “small.” The stem sa- appears in Kusaal saʋg “brush, broom” (i.e. thing for sweeping with); a corresponding plant name isn’t found in my Kusaal materials, but one turns up in Farefare sáagá, “a kind of grass used for making brooms.” Comparative evidence suggests that the grass is named after the sweeping implement, rather than vice versâ, but the town is probably named after the grass rather than the handy implement. The Kusaasi go for vegetation-based toponyms.
the grass is named after the sweeping implement
As in English. Cf. pie-plant.
Chelmondiston is as it looks, but the stress is on the third syllable
That surprises me. I would have guessed Chelmston, with a schwa for the second syllable, on the time-honored principle of doing away with as many syllables as possible.
It’s in contrast with the somewhat more accessible Chelmonnear.
Maybe invariably in Suffolk, I don’t know, but not in England as a whole. Stokenham in Devon is pronounced as an American would expect: /,stəʊ̯kən’hæm/. (On the other side of the Atlantic, Amherst in Massachusetts is pronounced as a British person would expect: /’æməst/.)
“The “r” is a lie — for “ar” read “ah.””
There’s an entertaining discussion of this by Geoff Lindsey over on Youtube: https://youtu.be/HnEIKavamks?si=p8EZPn5zxnYTvlZL
Not exactly anything earth-shattering, but it’s a fun explanation of (non-)rhoticism, graphemics, and cross-dialect confusions. I’m always glad that there are people taking the time to explain linguistic matters in a way that’s (I think) accessible to a wider audience but doesn’t try and dumb things down or simplify them into absurdity.
Very well made!
The reason B[ɻ̩]nie Sand[ɐ]s puts a /ɹ/ into Iowa could be that he grew up with the NURSE-CHOICE merger, eventually learned all the NURSE words when the merger fell out of fashion, and put [ɻ̩] in them… though how that got extended to the unstressed end of Iowa I don’t know either. Or maybe he simply planned to continue that particular sentence and then stopped instead.
I also can’t resist pointing out that [ʔ] is strictly postpausal in southern German, standard accents included; we live with a lot more smooth vowel transitions than the rest of… Europe, probably. (It is obligatory after a pause, though, unlike in French or indeed some Englishes.)
@David M.: a word-final intrusive “r” was historically a common feature of certain US non-rhotic accents. John F. Kennedy was stereotypically depicted as saying “Cuber” for “Cuba,” for example. As mentioned in this 2003 piece on the “Great Rhode Island Accent Reduction Program.” https://www.capecodtimes.com/story/news/2003/07/06/rhode-islanders-watch-what-they/50954143007/
Separately, I’m dubious about AC-B’s proposed pronunciation of “Amherst” because (hat should weigh in here) it assumes that non-rhoticism extends that far west in Massachusetts, which is generally not the case these days and may not even have been the case in former times. Although the toponym might exhibit the local-accent feature of “/æ/ raising to [ɛə],” to quote wikipedia.
Be dubious no more. To quote myself:
(I note that the following comment in that thread is by you.)
But “as if written Ammerst” is ambiguous, because not explicitly excluding “as if written Ammerst by a non-rhotic speaker,” like those deprecated as liars in the OP here. The -herst FWIW is the same morpheme that pops up in other toponyms as -hurst, which as a freestanding word has apparently also been hyrst, hirste, and various other possibilities if you go back far enough.
There’s apparently no toponym “H*rstham,” though.
But “as if written Ammerst” is ambiguous, because not explicitly excluding “as if written Ammerst by a non-rhotic speaker,”
Oh, come on. Now you’re just being difficult. To be explicit, no, there is no /h/ in Amherst.
But there is an /r/. Or an /ɹ/ if you prefer. The tendency of the non-rhotic (who don’t subjectively believe they are liars in this regard) to insert orthographic “r’s” that can fool unwary rhotic readers into pronouncing them is ubiquitous, as witness the popular Korean surname variously anglicized as “Pak” and “Park.”
My apologies — I got the wrong end of the stick. Yes, I agree with you that people in this part of Massachusetts pronounce the /r/; I guess I’m so focused on the /h/ issue that that slipped right past me. Perhaps by “in Massachusetts” he meant “in Boston,” like so many other people. (We Western Mass. residents get grumpy about that.)
That stereotype is actually brought up in the video – and disproved by video of JFK adding the /r/ before a vowel but not before a pause, both specifically with Cuba-r-as the example.
Two points. My visit to Amherst was in 1977: does that count as “former times”? My experience of how it was pronounced was not based on local people in the shops or on the street, but on faculty and students at Amherst College, who probably weren’t representative of the local population — probably no more so than that John Kennedy’s pronunciation of Cuber was representative of the majority population of Boston.
My impression is that most RP speakers say Cuber before a vowel, just like Indiar, Australiar, Chinar etc.
Yes, to the point that many actors keep it when they try to put on an American accent; I really recommend the video Nelson Goering posted in this thread!
I don’t live near Amherst as languagehat does, but I’ve had relatives there almost all my life (my grandfather taught at UMass) and visited many times, including before 1977. The only pronunciation I’ve ever heard is “Ammerst”, with the r pronounced, as in a rhotic American “first” or “worst”.
Yes, me too. I at first didn’t grasp what JWB meant.
i’m tickled to find that Athelington is nearly homonymous with what locals call the town just up mass ave from cambridge (for some values of initial ⟨a⟩).
and i generally agree with “amerst” being generally r-ful even for non-rhotic bostonians, but it’s a /r/ that does often get reduced or swallowed entirely (like the ones in “first” and “worst”). i’ve definitely heard (and i suspect said) versions much closer to “aməst” than anything else.
new england -hams vary widely, though: in my mental gazeteer, “framingham” and “hingham” have basically a syllabic /m/, “waltham” has a solid /θæm/, and “dedham” and “needham” have /ʊm/.
The Onehouse/Wun-uss example reminded me of a rural locality here in Derbyshire called Cowers Lane. It is speculated that the name originates with a Victorian map-maker’s mishearing of Cowhouse Lane in the local dialect (Cow’uss) – spelled by a non-rhotic speaker, of course.
I hadn’t heard of Athelington before this thread. However, when I went to a meeting in South Hadley in 2006 a participant from Boston who had brought his car took me and a couple of other people on a drive to Adams. I saw along the way that we passed quite close to Athol. I thought of asking him to make a short detour for me to take a photo, but I didn’t.
The hillside sloping down from my late parents’ house in Berkshire, England is called Nothing Hill on the large-scale OS map. I suspect strongly that a cartographer asked a local idler what the hill was called and was told ‘Nothing!’. This is too good a theory to check. The area is heavily wooded and was very lightly settled until the 19th century, even though it is less than 60 miles from London.
I love the theory!
The tendency of non-rhotic speakers to use rhotic vowels in phonetic descriptions, which are then taken literally by rhotic speakers, has a very interesting consequence: the Korean name “Park.” The pronunciation is, as you guessed, pa(h)k. But some r-eschewer thought the r was a great way to prevent people from saying “pack,” and the spelling stuck (this could be useful, because “peck/pack,” spelled Paek or Paik these days, is also a Korean name). Nowadays, rhotic General American is the most common variety of English in South Korea, so many Korean speakers named Park will insert an r when saying their name in English, even though they know perfectly well that their name doesn’t have an r in it!
I’ve never been able to pinpoint when exactly this spelling emerged, but I have a theory as to who the perpetrators were. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, large numbers of missionaries arrived in Korea from upstate New York. Other areas, too, but especially there. We know from recordings that until the early 20th century, upstate New York had a lot of non-rhotic speakers, with arhotics probably being in the majority. This would mean that we are saddled with this amusing-but-irritating folk pronunciation because of a dialect that effectively doesn’t exist anymore.
Nelson Goering: that video was very eye opening when I first watching it. I had no idea previously that speakers who merge the START and PALM vowels also don’t pay very close attention to distinguishing them in spelling, a fact that seems perfectly obvious in retrospect (how many Americans write about climbing “latters,” after all?).
“Burma” is another. I actually pronounce the (entirely spurious*) “r” in this. (I don’t think I’ve ever actually spoken the form “Myanmar”, so I’m not sure how I say it …)
*WP says: In Burmese, the pronunciation depends on the register used and is either Bama (pronounced [bəmà]) or Myamah (pronounced [mjəmà]).”
In German news it’s regularly [bırma(:)] and [Mi:anma:r], so the damage has spread beyond English.
Not [ˌmiːanˈmaː] without the [r]?
Newsspeakers aim for a rhotic pronunciation. Your version is what you get from the man on the street.
Guess I should watch more Tagesschau. Wouldn’t have imagined anyone outside shouting distance of Switzerland would aim for fully rhotic (i.e. even after long vowels).
I just checked a news story on the WDR3 homepage – no rhoticism.
Ok, looks like I remembered an older state of things. I checked yesterday’s Tagesschau; there’s a mix of rhotic and non-rhotic. There is even an “r” after /a/ at 6:06 in Warnhinweise, but some of the correspondents are fully arhotic.