> what the hell is going on with some of your town names like "Featherstonhaugh" One theory is that it was confused with "Fanshawe". We aren't even _trying_ to

> what the hell is going on with some of your town names like "Featherstonhaugh" One theory is that it was confused with "Fanshawe". We aren't even _trying_ to write what it sounds like: > So Festonhaw, which is the recorded shortening of Featherstonhaugh, was somehow garbled further to something like Fesnaw or Feshnaw [...then...] we can just say that the garbled Feshnaw sounded so similar to the preexisting surname Fanshawe, that people just conflated the two surnames in speech. > But not in writing. > We don't pronounce the -er suffix like we're French Though interestingly you've kept that with "herb" - in British English, it has a hard H (but I'm not quite sure what you mean by the -er suffix - in my experience, it's the same in both. Did you mean -re?) https://www.quora.com/How-did-the-surname-Featherstonhaugh-get-its-completely-unintuitive-pronunciation https://www.quora.com/How-did-the-surname-Featherstonhaugh-g... It's not exclusively a British thing though - Connecticut and Poughkeepsie come to mind.