Drew's Most Excellent Adventures, Part I | 38 comments (38 topical, editorial, 0 hidden)

Re: Shire (none / 1)

Thinking about your comment on British pronounciation, the word 'shire' on its own is pronounced 'shire', but as part of a county name it is pronounced 'sheer'.

The county I live in is Berkshire, pronounced 'barksheer', but you could also call it the Shire of Berks (pronounced 'shire of barks') although that would be a rather archaic description.

It is quite common that the standard spelling for English place names disagrees with the way the locals actually say the name. I am not sure if that is down to changes over time in the actual pronounciation or just because someone who had never been near the place decreed the way its name was spelt.

by Gary J on Wed Aug 2nd, 2006 at 07:25:47 PM EST

Re: Shire (none / 1)

The county I live in is Berkshire, pronounced 'barksheer', but you could also call it the Shire of Berks (pronounced 'shire of barks') although that would be a rather archaic description.

And the mountains (or hills rather) by the same name in MA are called 'Berksheers'. Us Americans can't seem to figure out how to pronounce 'Houston'. The street by that name here is pronounced 'howston' while the city is 'hueston'.

by MarekNYC on Wed Aug 2nd, 2006 at 07:33:16 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Shire (none / 1)

After giving this entirely too much thought I have decided that it must have been the Post Office which standardised the spelling of towns and counties. It would be more important for its purposes that everyone agreed the spelling than that the pronounciation was right.

by Gary J on Wed Aug 2nd, 2006 at 07:51:23 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Shire (none / 1)

English pronunciation of [consonant]er[consonant] in the 16th-18th centuries was commonly -ar-. This pronunciation has lived on in Berkshire and Derby, while spelling of placenames has remained conservative (see Gloucester, Worcester, Leicester, Towcester...) Of course, you're right that at some point (in the 19th C) the central administration set the spelling of placenames for good.

Common nouns varied more. If the accent was on the -ar- syllable, we have generally retained that pronunciation, and almost always spelling has changed to fit it:

Middle English yerd (yard, garden), pronounced yaird with rolled r, became pronounced and spelled yard;
ME herte (heart), pronounced hairtuh, became pronounced hart and spelled with an added a, heart.
a notable counter-example is ME clerk (cleric, scholar), pronounced clairk, became pronounced clark but its spelling remained unchanged just for the hell of it.

When the tonic accent was not on that syllable (or shifted from that syllable), the -ar- pronunciation died out.

Why Americans pronounce Berkshire, Derby, and clerk as they are written derives from an early-American concern with standards of proper spelling and spelling-based pronunciation. See Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans - The Colonial Experience, ch 43, Culture by the Book: The Spelling Fetish :

Emphasis on "rules" of proper speaking and writing profoundly influenced the whole American attitude toward pronunciation. It explains what is still the most important distinction between English and American pronunciation, the tendency toward "spelling pronunciation". Very early, Americans began trying to discover how a word "ought" to be pronounced by seeing how it was spelled. This seemed to provide a ready standard of pronunciation in a land without a cultural capital or a ruling intellectual aristocracy.
<...>
Our insistent spelling-pronunciation shows itself in our habit of preserving the full value of syllables. In long words like secretary, explanatory <...> we preserve the full value of all <...> while the English <...> say "secret'ry", "explanat'ry". <...> Our deference to spelling as a guide to pronunciation has been so strong that we have kept alive here ways of speech which soon died in England. <...> Our weakness for spelling-pronunciation affected the pronunciation of proper names, and especially the names of places. In England these had a purely traditional and casual pronunciation, but Americans who hear Worcester pronounced Wooster are apt to spell it that way; and Birmingham is fully and carefully pronounced, never in the elided English manner.

Birmingham or Nottingham...

by afew (afew(a in a circle)eurotrib_dot_com) on Thu Aug 3rd, 2006 at 05:23:56 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Shire (none / 0)

Am awesomely scholarly response to my idle musings.

by Gary J on Thu Aug 3rd, 2006 at 06:51:18 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Shire (4.00 / 2)

Afew, ET Kolkhoz chief, is never idle.

Nothing is 'mere'. — Richard P. Feynman

by Migeru (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Thu Aug 3rd, 2006 at 06:53:40 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Shire (4.00 / 2)

Kolkhoz production up this year (like every year).

The victorious march forward of the people (in spite of hailstorm unleashed by capitalist running dogs) will once again produce more courgettes than anyone can eat.

by afew (afew(a in a circle)eurotrib_dot_com) on Thu Aug 3rd, 2006 at 07:23:03 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Shire (4.00 / 2)

I raise my glass of potato bioethanol fuel to you, Afew!

Nothing is 'mere'. — Richard P. Feynman

by Migeru (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Thu Aug 3rd, 2006 at 07:25:51 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Shire (4.00 / 3)

Drink fast or Kolkhoz chief gets obligatory ten per cent.

by afew (afew(a in a circle)eurotrib_dot_com) on Thu Aug 3rd, 2006 at 07:59:02 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Shire (none / 1)

The town Worcester which is located in Massachusetts in the US is ofcourse pronounced Woostaah, the local dialect in general avoiding or under-pronounsing R's. Like in the example sentence: "Paahk thaah caah in haavaahd yaahd" (Park the car in harvard yard), or the famous NewEngland saying "Yah caahn't geht theaah f[r]aahm haah" (You can't get there from here), a surprisingly useful sentence to begin with when you have to give someone directions in Cambridge or Boston. In my several years there I never quite learned to understand the local dialect.

by someone (s0me1smail(a)gmail(d)com) on Thu Aug 3rd, 2006 at 07:15:41 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Shire (none / 1)

give someone directions in Cambridge or Boston.

That's more than a job, almost a vocation. I remember spending an evening in a taxi looking for an address in what I thought was Boston. The driver was a funny guy, he didn't know his way around too well, which might be explained by the Columbian import he kept ready-rolled (and ready-to-share) on the dashboard. When we didn't find the street, he decided to go back to Logan (where he'd picked me up) to ask the state troopers. State troopers didn't know. Neither did the police in three or four places we went, or people we stopped in the street. We went over to Cambridge to try, but people there, though they're supposed to know a lot, didn't know about this. I was beginning to get hardened to breezing into police stations with a banana-sized smile and a flashing sign over my head saying Stoned Agin, when a police officer said: "Peaceable Street ain't in Bawston, it's in Brighton!"

From there on, it seemed, everything was clear (though not to me...) End of ride at midnight. Good thing the driver had turned the meter off a long way back :-)

by afew (afew(a in a circle)eurotrib_dot_com) on Thu Aug 3rd, 2006 at 07:54:12 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Shire (4.00 / 3)

Oh, I know. I get asked directions a lot, anywhere I go. I must look approachable, or something. After living in Cambridge for several years I got pretty good at it. What really doesn't help is that there are many streets with the same name in Cambridge, Boston, Birighton, Allston, Sommerville, etc, etc. And these streets will be nowhere near each other even if the towns are. For directions to some locations from others it was a very good idea to begin with "you can't get there from here", and then proceed with "but if you insist, this is how you do it", and "yes, this is the simplest route, through parking lots, back alleys, and all".

I love that area. Completely insane streets with no hope for reasonable traffic flow. And the local authorities must have passes some ordinance mandating that each street be dug up at least once a year, and then patched unevenly, we wouldn't want a smooth ride for anyone, now would we. In eight years I rode two sturdy mountainbikes from cradle to death on those roads. During this time, the very short stretch of Mass. ave. in Cambridge that I rode was constantly under construction. They were digging, and filling, and patching, and digging again. Compared to this Geneva really has its shit together. Smooth roads, entirely reasonable traffic, well organized everything. I had a far more passionate relationship with the roads of Cambridge/Boston. How I miss them!
(No snark should be read into the above passage, I am entirely serious. I loved those roads, dangerous and damage inflicting as they were on a bike.)

by someone (s0me1smail(a)gmail(d)com) on Thu Aug 3rd, 2006 at 09:06:03 AM EST
[ Parent ]

just to let you know (none / 0)

they're still working on mass ave in Cambridge. I just moved out of Boston a few months ago.

One of my favorite "automobile insanity" facts about Boston is the rule that any street that crosses Washington street has to change names. If I recall correctly there are five different Washington streets just in Boston proper.

you are the media you consume.

by MillMan (millguy at gmail) on Thu Aug 3rd, 2006 at 04:17:03 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Shire (4.00 / 4)

Except when you live somewhere posh like I do, in which case it's prounounced 'shah.'

Hence 'Wiltchshaah'. (You have to say it so you can hear the capitalisation.)

British pronounciation generally is occasionally almost random. Mildenhall used to be pronounced 'Minal' until lots of weekenders moved in. I'm not even going to attempt Compton Pauncefoot.

And don't get me started on postal addresses. How did 'Oxon' appear as a contraction of 'Oxfordshire'? Or 'Hants' from 'Hampshire'?

by ThatBritGuy (thatbritguy (at) googlemail.com) on Wed Aug 2nd, 2006 at 08:54:50 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Shire (4.00 / 3)

My step-dad said once that if Niagra Falls was in Britain, it'd be called Neffals.

Maybe we can eventually make language a complete impediment to understanding. -Hobbes

by Izzy (izzy at eurotrib dot com) on Wed Aug 2nd, 2006 at 09:20:44 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Shire (4.00 / 3)

Huh? You mean you don't pronounce it that way?

by afew (afew(a in a circle)eurotrib_dot_com) on Thu Aug 3rd, 2006 at 05:29:20 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Shire (4.00 / 3)

Oxon is from the Latin name for Oxford, Oxonia, and its adjective Oxoniensis.

Hants I found by googling:

"Hampshire" is often abbreviated in written form to "Hants" and which sometimes gives rise to puzzlement. The abbreviated form is derived from the Old English Hantum plus Scir (meaning a district governed from the settlement now known as Southampton) and the Anglo-Saxons called it Hamtunschire. At the time of the Domesday Book (1086) this was compressed to Hantescire.

by afew (afew(a in a circle)eurotrib_dot_com) on Thu Aug 3rd, 2006 at 06:01:16 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Drew's Most Excellent Adventures, Part I | 38 comments (38 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)

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