{"id":39190,"date":"2017-07-06T03:00:32","date_gmt":"2017-07-06T07:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=39190"},"modified":"2017-07-06T15:03:37","modified_gmt":"2017-07-06T19:03:37","slug":"english-place-name-pronunciation-for-non-english-folks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/07\/06\/english-place-name-pronunciation-for-non-english-folks\/","title":{"rendered":"English place name pronunciation for non-English folks"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I was born in England, but having been in Canada for most of my life, I don&#8217;t have an infallible key to remembering how to pronounce many English town and region names. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kimdutoit.com\/2017\/07\/05\/no-frigging-rules\/\" target=\"_blank\">Kim du Toit<\/a> is on an extended visit to Blighty, so he does his best here to clue in all us furriners about English place names:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The town of Cirencester is pronounced \u201cSiren-sister\u201d, but the town of Bicester is not <em>Bye-sister<\/em>, but \u201cBister\u201d, like <em>mister<\/em>. Similarly, Worcester is pronounced \u201cWusster\u201d (like <em>wussy<\/em>), which makes the almost unpronounceable Worcestershire (the county) quite simple: \u201cWusster-shirr\u201d (and not <em>Wor-sester-shyre<\/em>, as most Americans mispronounce it).<\/p>\n<p>Now pay careful attention. A \u201cshire\u201d (pronounced \u201cshyre\u201d) is a name for county*, but when it comes at the end of a word, e.g. Lincolnshire, it\u2019s pronounced \u201cLinconn-shirr\u201d. The shire is named after the county seat, e.g. the aforementioned Worcester (\u201cWusster\u201d) becomes Worcestershire (\u201cWuss-ter-shirr\u201d) and Leicester (\u201cLess-ter\u201d) becomes Leicestershire (\u201cLess-ter-shirr\u201d). Unless it\u2019s the town of Chester, where the county is named Cheshire (\u201cChesh-shirr\u201d) and not <em>Chester-shirr<\/em>. Also Lancaster becomes Lancashire (\u201cLanca-shirr\u201d), not <em>Lancaster-shirr<\/em>, and Wilton begat Wiltshire (\u201cWilt-shirr\u201d). Wilton is not the county seat; Salisbury is. Got all that?<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>*Actually, \u201cshire\u201d is the term for a noble estate, e.g. the Duke of Bedford\u2019s estate was called Bedfordshire, which later became a county; ditto Buckingham(-shire) and so on, except in southern England, where the Old Saxon term held sway, and the estate of the Earl of Essex became \u201cEssex\u201d and not <strong>Essex-shire<\/strong>, which would have been confusing, not to say unpronounceable. Ditto Sussex, Middlesex and Wessex. Also, the \u201c-sexes\u201d were once <strong>kingdoms<\/strong> and not estates. And in the northeast of England are places named East Anglia (after the Angles settled there) and Northumbria (ditto), which isn\u2019t a county but an area (once a kingdom), now encompassing as it does Yorkshire and the Scottish county Lothian \u2014 which I\u2019m not going to explain further because I\u2019m starting to bore <strong>myself<\/strong>.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And all rules of pronunciation go out the window when it comes to Northumbrian accents like Geordie (in Newcastle-On-Tyne) anyway, because the Geordies are incomprehensible even to the <em>Scots<\/em>, which just goes to show you.<\/p>\n<p>Now here\u2019s where it gets <em>really<\/em> confusing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><strong>Update<\/strong>: I managed to get seven of the nine (but one was a guess &#8230; a friend on the outskirts of Pittsburgh had tipped me off): <a href=\"http:\/\/www.atlasobscura.com\/articles\/demonyms-linguistics-nicknames\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Atlas Obscura<\/em> on unusual demonyms<\/a>. The ones I didn&#8217;t get were Leeds and Wolverhampton.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Here\u2019s a very fun game to play: Take a list of cities with unusual demonyms \u2014 that\u2019s the category of words describing either a person from a certain place, or a property of that place, like New Yorker or Italian \u2014 and ask people to guess what the demonym is. Here are some favorites I came up with, with the help of historical linguist Lauren Fonteyn, a lecturer at the University of Manchester. It\u2019s tilted a bit in favor of the U.K. for two reasons. First is that Fonteyn lives and works there, and second is that the U.K. has some excellently weird ones. The answer key is at the bottom.<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Glasgow, Scotland<\/li>\n<li>Newcastle, England<\/li>\n<li>Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania<\/li>\n<li>Liverpool, England<\/li>\n<li>Leeds, England<\/li>\n<li>Wolverhampton, England<\/li>\n<li>Madagascar<\/li>\n<li>Halifax, Canada<\/li>\n<li>Barbados<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>Demonyms are personal and vital to our conceptions of ourselves. Few things are more important to our identities than where we\u2019re from. This explains why people invariably feel the need to correct anyone who gets their demonym wrong. \u201cIt&#8217;s understudied but it&#8217;s kind of important,\u201d says Fonteyn, who is originally from Belgium. \u201cI moved to Manchester and had no idea what the demonym was. And if you do it wrong, people will get very, very mad at you.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The demonym for people from or properties of Manchester is \u201cMancunian,\u201d which dates back to the Latin word for the area, \u201cMancunium.\u201d It is, like the other fun demonyms we\u2019re about to get into, irregular, which means it does not follow the accepted norms of how we modify place names to come up with demonyms. In other words, someone has to tell you that the correct word is \u201cMancunian\u201d and not \u201cManchesterian.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I was born in England, but having been in Canada for most of my life, I don&#8217;t have an infallible key to remembering how to pronounce many English town and region names. Kim du Toit is on an extended visit to Blighty, so he does his best here to clue in all us furriners about [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,7],"tags":[570,400],"class_list":["post-39190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-history","tag-england","tag-language"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-ac6","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39190","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39190"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39190\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39221,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39190\/revisions\/39221"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}