Pronunciations

[40hz]

I love a bit of Bay-zil and Oreg-ano on my pasta. 

 

Well done to the OP. Never before has a thread made me so angry. Not the even the 'tonewood' one.  😂

Edited March 18, 2022 by 40hz

[Rich]

7 hours ago, ezbass said:

Asparagus, seems straightforward and one way to pronounce it, right? Ooh no. Watching the TV some years back, we were treated to a Scottish gardener who pronounced it - áss-per-aar-gus, I was so open mouthed at the time, the TV might’ve fitted in - sideways!

At Casa Rich, said vegetable is pronounced (with tongue firmly in cheek) as arse-para-goose.

[ezbass]

52 minutes ago, Rich said:

At Casa Rich, said vegetable is pronounced (with tongue firmly in cheek) as arse-para-goose.

I like to call it comedy veg, what with the stinky pee, especially when you forget you ate it and the noxious cloud takes you by surprise 🤢😂.

[Velarian]

8 hours ago, ezbass said:

I like to call it comedy veg, what with the stinky pee, especially when you forget you ate it and the noxious cloud takes you by surprise 🤢😂.

So that’s what the problem is? I never knew that! 😟 I was beginning to wonder if I might have a medical issue. Every day’s a school day. 😂

[ezbass]

1 hour ago, Velarian said:

So that’s what the problem is? I never knew that! 😟 I was beginning to wonder if I might have a medical issue. Every day’s a school day. 😂

Try eating a beetroot and asparagus salad, colour and aroma!

[Leonard Smalls]

Then there's the simple ones, like Shrewsbury, or scone - the varied pronunciations seem to depend on whether you're posh, northern or neither.

Then it gets more complicated, Cholmondely in Cheshire, or Woolfardisworthy in Devon. Who knows why they're Chumley and Woolsery!

[Velarian]

Here in West Yorkshire we have Slaithwaite commonly pronounced by locals as Slawit, which I put down to the inherent laziness of the Yorkshire dialect, tha nos. 😉

[ezbass]

It still confounds me how Magdalen is pronounced maudlin, or how we get mingies from Menzies.  

[Islander]

10 hours ago, ezbass said:

It still confounds me how Magdalen is pronounced maudlin, or how we get mingies from Menzies.  

The Z in Menzies is a corruption of the Yogh character which is derived from G.  Scots printers often used a tailed Z when they didn't have Yogh and the mixup remains.

[Nail Soup]

4 hours ago, Islander said:

The Z in Menzies is a corruption of the Yogh character which is derived from G.  Scots printers often used a tailed Z when they didn't have Yogh and the mixup remains.

I think there is a similar explanation for ‘Ye’ as in Ye Olde Tea Shoppe. It was never pronounced with a Y ….. there just used to be a symbol (thorn?) for a TH sound and it looked like a cross between a Y and T. Sometimes printers would just use Y assuming that everyone would get it. Or maybe some later people read the thorn(?) as a Y.

Edited March 20, 2022 by Nail Soup

[zbd1960]

6 hours ago, Nail Soup said:

I think there is a similar explanation for ‘Ye’ as in Ye Olde Tea Shoppe. It was never pronounced with a Y ….. there just used to be a symbol (thorn?) for a TH sound and it looked like a cross between a Y and T. Sometimes printers would just use Y assuming that everyone would get it. Or maybe some later people read the thorn(?) as a Y.

Yes. There are various letters which have dropped out of use in English - yogh and thorn being two of them. Thorn (aka Icelandic thorn) is an old runic character and it's pronounced 'th'. In old written text, you'll often see 'the' written as torn with what looks like a superscript 'e'.

 

When printing came along, most printers didn't bother to have a thorn character and substituted 'y' for it... as it looked similar... People knew that 'ye' meant 'the'.

 

So it's 'the olde shoppe' not 'you olde shoppe' which is nonsense. 

 

And I live in Shropshire.... You get both pronunciations for Shrewsbury used. The name seems to have an Anglo-Saxon origin with a person named something like 'Schroeb', which would tend to point to 'shrow' rather than 'shrew'... but both occur. And I regularly drive past Chomondeley.

 

Most cases where pronunciation and spelling diverge is because the spelling was fixed when printing came along and the pronunciation has has since changed. E.g. the 'k' in words like knife and knight used to be pronounced.  

[Woodinblack]

1 hour ago, zbd1960 said:

Yes. There are various letters which have dropped out of use in English - yogh and thorn being two of them. Thorn (aka Icelandic thorn) is an old runic character and it's pronounced 'th'. In old written text, you'll often see 'the' written as torn with what looks like a superscript 'e'.

 

When printing came along, most printers didn't bother to have a thorn character and substituted 'y' for it... as it looked similar... People knew that 'ye' meant 'the'.  

so þe (can't type superscript in this font). Wasn't really 'didn't bother', printing presses were generally French, they didn't have the character

 

[Islander]

10 hours ago, Nail Soup said:

I think there is a similar explanation for ‘Ye’ as in Ye Olde Tea Shoppe. It was never pronounced with a Y ….. there just used to be a symbol (thorn?) for a TH sound and it looked like a cross between a Y and T. Sometimes printers would just use Y assuming that everyone would get it. Or maybe some later people read the thorn(?) as a Y.

Yep, thats a thorn and it's still in use in Icelandic.  The modern version looks a bit like a capital D with the upright extended above and below the semicircle - sometimes there's a small horizontal line that intersects the semicircle halfway down.  The (Ye?) old English version looks like a Y with a slightly shallower 'v' and a forward hooked tail, hence the mix up.  Fascinating stuff isn't it?

 

[Islander]

Here's another beauty for you:

 

Featherstonehaugh pronounced Fanshaw.  😄

 

And while we're on about old characters, another use of the yogh:

 

Culzean (as in Culzean castle) pronounced Kul AYN

 

Edited March 20, 2022 by Islander

[Nail Soup]

Or Arkansas pronounced Arkinsaw.

[Staggering on]

When I came over in 2018 to attend the BC double bass bash at Bicester I was very glad that I found out that it was not "Bye-sester" before I actually got there, we colonials have to be careful when we get back to the homeland.😊

[BillyBass]

On 18/03/2022 at 11:31, ezbass said:

Which leads onto words like lieutenant and Loughborough (lowgahborowgah?  ) As far as I can remember from conversations with teachers with an interest in these things, British spellings and pronunciations are the product of deciding a language by committee, taking into account every tribe's idiosyncrasies and having every dialect represented in some form or other.

Our pronunciation comes from Norman French.  'In lieu tenant' i.e. when the main man isn't here, this one is the boss.  The Normans, and some other regions of France pronounced it 'liev'.  So the Americans aren't wrong to say "Lootenant". Not sure how much more Norman French there is in English still; 'warranty' for guarantee is the only other one I know.

 

The spelling of English has become standardised with the advent of dictionaries.  Prior to dictionaries, spellings were often regional, presumably following the local pronunciation.

 

Sorry, I'm one of those with an interest in these things.