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British aristocracy has been pronouncing their own surnames wrong for centuries on purpose. Cholmondeley is "Chumley" Featherstonehaugh is "Fanshaw." If you rea
by bluepeter 8mo ago
British aristocracy has been pronouncing their own surnames wrong for centuries on purpose. Cholmondeley is "Chumley" Featherstonehaugh is "Fanshaw." If you read it phonetically you mark yourself as an outsider. The misstake is the membership card. (Heck, even in Portland we locals hear about misprouncing Couch St probably every year in local press as some bar for membership to our own locals only vibe.)
- teachrdan 8mo agoThere's also the British penchant for deliberately mispronouncing French words. I have heard "renaissance" pronounced "reh-NAY-sance", "fillet" pronounced "fill-it", "valet" as "val-it" and so on. I think it's a national point of pride to pronounce the words of their neighbor incorrectly.
- bluepeter 8mo agoYep. And try "lieutenant" or "herb" on for size. (Edit: I guess "herb" is a bit of a complex one... originally from Latin's "herba" where the H was pronounced, but from UK it came most immediately from French's "herbe" with no H sound. So UK did somehow shortcut back to a more original sound.)
- jpfromlondon 8mo agoAmerica is at least as guilty of mispronouncing non-english words it's just natural drift. As to fillet and valet, they joined english before the contemporary french pronunciation, and are much closer to the middle-french.
- hnuser123456 8mo agoApparently, workers on the Gemini space program pronounced it "Jeh-mih-nee" back then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Gemini#Pronunciation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Gemini#Pronunciation
- jpfromlondon 8mo agothe soft g is triggering, I can hear my classics tutor yelling even 20+ years later, don't get me started on the american pronunciation of hegemony!
- rkomorn 8mo agoI'm always amused by some mispronunciations that stray farther away from the original than necessary. My favorite is probably crepe, which Americans pronounce like an almost diphthong-y craype (or crape like grape I guess) when crep (like step) would do just fine and be closer to the original. But as a native French and basically-native American speaker, I also couldn't really care less about it, or about things like Americans pronouncing the t in croissant, or French people being unable to say the.
- tracker1 8mo agoThe plural is what gets me though crepes (just sounds weird as krehps vs krayps).
- rkomorn 8mo agoI kinda get it, but you can say step and stehps, not stayps, so why not krehps? I say it the American way when I speak English anyway because that's just how it is. :)
- jpfromlondon 8mo agoI notice the variance in british and american pronunciation of especially romance + greek words, correct or otherwise and I'm willing to give credit where it's due, I'm also happy to celebrate the differences rather than mock or correct them, I just won't accept the slander!
- bloak 8mo ago"Valet" and "cadet" is an interesting pair: they rhyme in French (/va.lɛ/ and /ka.dɛ/), but rhyming them in English would be ... unusual. If there were just French words pronounced in a French way and English words which came from French and are now pronounced in an English way that would be bad enough but in fact we have a whole spectrum of bastardisation.
- sebzim4500 8mo agoInterestingly in British english valet would rhyme with cadet if you were referring to a servant and not to someone who will park your car.
- mattmanser 8mo agoSo this isn't the British being deliberate obtuse, foreigners pronounce English words wrong all the time and we don't accuse them of doing it on purpose. They do it because that's how they would pronounce those words in their language. Fillet/valet are mis-pronounced because of mallet, pallet, etc. Renaissance? Nail, snail, tail, etc. It really is that simple, we're just pronouncing them as if they were an English word.
- OJFord 8mo agoThose are the standard British pronunciations, if you meant 'I have heard' as though it might be a niche or occasional occurrence. ('fill-ay' et al. are AmE pronunciations.) It's not always that way though, consider 'niche': it's AmE that decided it's 'nitch'!
- gib444 8mo agoIt's a national past time for us Brits to annoy the French. Kind of how two cousins who don't like each other would behave at a family gathering
- klondike_klive 8mo agoSurely the American way of saying "REN-uh-saunce" is further from the French than the British pronunciation?
- stackghost 8mo ago>Cholmondeley is "Chumley" Featherstonehaugh is "Fanshaw." If you read it phonetically you mark yourself as an outsider. This is a monstrous crime against language.
- throwaway94275 8mo agowell how do you say Newfoundland? Soon it will be said "Noovlan"
- stackghost 8mo agoPeople from there generally pronounce it "New-fund-LAND", people from the rest of (english) Canada tend pronounce it "NEW-fund-land". It's still got three syllables.
- ChoGGi 8mo agoI tend to go with "Newfn-lan".
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- AdamN 8mo agoSame as Texans asking where Houston Street is in NYC.
- woopwoop 8mo agoBut Houston Street is older than Sam Houston, and was always pronounced that way.
- adi_kurian 8mo agoMy Scottish mate with the surname Houston would side with the Texans, on this one.
- steveklabnik 8mo agoAnd likewise, Austin has a bunch of names that are pronounced oddly.
- jasondigitized 8mo agoManchaca checking in
- FpUser 8mo agoHere in Toronto area city of Vaughan pronounced as (/vɔːn/ or /vɑːn/) like in "dawn" or "gone" Imaging me fresh from USSR asking someone how do I get to ... and getting blank stare
- bluepeter 8mo agoThat's great. What's also amusing is how you felt it necessary to provide the diacritical pronunciation guide for "Vaughan"... because I think to most native English speakers we can't imagine any other pronunciation!
- FpUser 8mo agoI think native English speaker who had never heard of Vaughan (sure we can find some of those) would likely to pronounce it like "Vog-un" - /ˈvɒɡən/ or "Vog-han" - /ˈvɑːɡən/
- SoftTalker 8mo agoNo, "gh" is usually silent in English spelling.
- radpanda 8mo agoI don't really see that as the same thing as what the article was pointing out. Those are shibboleths that only an insider would know. You have to get the pronunciation of Cholmondeley or Couch "right" to pass for an insider. The random misspellings, missing spaces, sloppy grammar, etc in the examples in the article seem different to me. Misspelling "en route" as "enriewu" doesn't show, "look, I know the secret country club spelling for en route". It simply shows that you don't have to care about your mistakes. You write something that approximates what you mean, and you're too important to spend time revising. The mistake could be "enrout" or "n route" or on any other word. But you're not going to be a try-hard who edits and frets over their messages, you're blessing someone with 10 seconds of your attention and they're lucky to receive your correspondence, typos and all.
- farisa_lives 8mo ago[dead]
- simonra 8mo agoWe’ve known since Socrates that writing instead of speaking eroded thinking. We seriously need to stop putting packaging, especially writing, on a pedestal. Instead we should put what little lifetime we have in sum towards focusing on what’s actually important: the ideas and concepts themselves.
- andai 8mo ago>It simply shows that you don't have to care about your mistakes. Interesting, is that the equivalent of billionaires wearing sweatpants?
- frm88 8mo agoYes. It is also the equivalent of heads of states calling other persons dumb on camera. The absolute decomposition of respect and decorum.
- tracker1 8mo ago
- gabrielsroka 8mo ago> misstake I see what you did there. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law
- fractallyte 8mo agoA smelling pistake
- gosub100 8mo agoIs it the same reason as Worcestershire mapped to "wooster" ?
- loloquwowndueo 8mo agoPlymouth -> plee-mooth not ply-mouth
- foobarian 8mo agoOutsider! :-) More like PLIM-uth. I guess there is no way to write it unambiguously in English
- loloquwowndueo 8mo agoNot outsider - non-native speaker.
- coldtea 8mo agomaybe "Pleemuth"?
- drdec 8mo agoI hope you aren't talking about the one in Massachusetts which is not pronounced either of those ways
- loloquwowndueo 8mo agoNo, im talking about this one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plymouth_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plymouth_(software)
- drdec 8mo agoBut the link says it is named after Plymouth Rock which is indeed the Plymouth in Massachusetts
- deleted 8mo ago
- z500 8mo agoThat's just centuries of change without updating spelling, a la Leicester or Worcester.
- happymellon 8mo agoPronunciation inconsistency is due to all the invasions. You should watch Map Men. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uYNzqgU7na4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uYNzqgU7na4
- jrflowers 8mo agoNote that you only pronounce Couch that way in Portland when talking about the street. You wouldn’t maintain the pronunciation when saying eg “Sorry for spilling wine on your couch”
- therein 8mo ago> in Portland we locals hear about misprouncing Couch St That explains why many years ago when I visited Portland, a homeless guy corrected my pronunciation of that while we were walking past him.
- bitwize 8mo agoIn New Orleans, protesters against outsiders acquiring and developing real estate hold up signs that read "Say Tchoupitoulas" (/ˌtʃɑp ə ˈtuː ləs/). I give my wife lots of hassle about the pronunciations of Louisiana place names like Tchoupitoulas, Natchitoches (/ˈnæk ə ˌdɪʃ/, really!), etc. especially when she complains about northeastern place names like "Leominster".
- gbacon 8mo agoNackadish!
- strotter 8mo agoIn case you're wondering, Couch St. in Portland, Oregon, USA is pronounced "Cooch." It's named for 19th century ship captain and early businessman John H. Couch. It's the "C" street in the so-called Alphabet District north of Burnside, which is the "B" street. There are, or were, other landmarks named after Capt. Couch, but I'm not sure if any still exist.
- anonymousiam 8mo agoThere's also St. John, which for some odd reason is pronounced as sinjin. https://old.reddit.com/r/madmen/comments/12i3n9o/why_is_saint_john_powells_first_name_pronounced/ https://old.reddit.com/r/madmen/comments/12i3n9o/why_is_sain...
- broken-kebab 8mo agoDid they? The article[1] seem to be in contradiction to the claim. For centuries it was rather easy to distinguish aristocracy without lingustic conspiracies. I'm really not an expert in British surnames however I know for sure that pop history is full of invented "fun facts" which are not true but persist cause they sound cool. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Featherstonhaugh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Featherstonhaugh
- shawn_w 8mo agoFeatherstonehaugh pronounced Fanshaw is apparently something made up by P.G. Wodehouse for one of his characters. It's just Featherston-haw for everyone in reality.
- DonHopkins 8mo agoThe character Beauchamp ("BEE-jum") Day in Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City is a softening of the English aristocratic way ("Bee-chum") of the French spelling Beauchamp ("boh-SHON" as the French would say). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76tVgne0gOA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76tVgne0gOA But he's less a British aristocrat than a brittle prep-school martinet in a cheap tie who rants at a secretary over three typos like a duke defending the realm, sneers about Kelly girls and office decor as if guarding the Social Register, treats sleeping with his own employee as proof of authority, and then sneaks off to bathhouses while running his typing pool with equal parts class anxiety, closet panic, and a middle manager's superiority complex.
- DonHopkins 8mo agoSometimes I wonder about the aristocrats who towns and roads in the UK were named after, like Lord Penistone of South Yorkshire, or Lady Sluts Hole of Norfolk. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penistone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penistone https://www.norfolklive.co.uk/news/norfolk-news/rude-funny-street-names-norfolk-6101131 https://www.norfolklive.co.uk/news/norfolk-news/rude-funny-s...