The Off Topic Topic

[garbon]

You Brits and your funny place name pronunciations

How about Lympne?

Limp knee?

Lim

[Syt]

Weirdest English town name I recently came across was the: Chapel-en-le-Frith

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chapel-en-le-Frith

[HVC]

You Brits and your funny place name pronunciations

How about Lympne?

Limp knee?

Lim

To use the parlance of the people, that's just taking the piss.

[Josquius]

Near here we have a place called Chichester. Pronounced Chi as in China.
Down south there's a rather more famous place called Chichester. It is pronounced Chi as in chit.

[Tamas]

Near here we have a place called Chichester. Pronounced Chi as in China.
Down south there's a rather more famous place called Chichester. It is pronounced Chi as in chit.

 

Having grown up in a country where it took centralised effort to save and standardise the language in the 19th century, it sure feels weird that while every region on the island share the same written language, they differ majorly on what sounds those written letters actually refer to.

[HVC]

My totally non scientific and speculative assumption is that the further north you go the less Norman influence there is and the more nonsensical the pronunciations get

[Sheilbh]

My totally non scientific and speculative assumption is that the further north you go the less Norman influence there is and the more nonsensical the pronunciations get

And you're right! (Sort of) I think you're right on the Norman influence point - and this is true in the Medieval period and endures.

Chaucer was writing at the same time as the Gawain and the Green Knight was written (by the "Gawain poet" because we don't know who). But they are very different. Chaucer's a Londoner, works in a French-speaking court - his Middle English has lots of French influence both in terms of vocabulary and structure but also poetic style. The Gawain poet's works are in an older, more Anglo-Saxon English in spelling (they use thorn), vocab but also style. It's alliterative which is the Anglo-Saxon poetic style while Chaucer uses rhyme.

So that divide is there really early - and Chaucer's style, the style of government officials in London (like him) and merchants in London wins. It becomes "English". I think there's really interesting stuff on this in American English because my understanding is it preserves older forms of English in some ways (basically from the time the colonists left) and some patterns actually reflect the regions of strong emigration to America (like East Anglia). But even now there's more legacy of Anglo-Saxon in Northern accents and dialects, especially the North-East ("gan" "toon") where there's also a more pronounced (and still audible) legacy of the Norse.

Having grown up in a country where it took centralised effort to save and standardise the language in the 19th century, it sure feels weird that while every region on the island share the same written language, they differ majorly on what sounds those written letters actually refer to.

Yeah so the whole standardisation of pronunciation ("RP"/"Queen's English") is basically an invention of the BBC and broadcasting.

The BBC invented a BBC accent which sounds posh now - but the idea from Lord Reith (the first Director-General, who had a Scottish accent - and did not use the BBC accent when he was broadcasting) was to speak in a way that no-one would not understand and no-one would mock It was different from the public school accent though. Now it's swung the other way and there is a general view and approach on the BBC and broadcasters that there basically should be diversity of accents in continuity announcers, newsreaders etc. Although the accents are broadly continuing to decline as estuary and MLE spreads - I think the exceptions where it will survive are areas where accent and dialect is bound up with a strong regional identity (the North-East, Liverpool, Manchester etc).

As I say there was a fairly standardised public school accent that emerged from public schools and universities (especially when their weren't many of them) that applied to that class - but not always entirely. So I think we cast back now and imagine posh people in the past all speaking with RP when, in fact, they often had distinctive accents of their own which were regional. Gladstone was reported as having a Lancashire accent. I think there's a recording of Lord Tennyson reading one of his poems and he has a Lincolnshire accent. And I don't think that's how we imagine the great Victorians, far less people further back.

In a way I think it's one of those weird things of Britain developing as a nation very late - basically in the 20th century. So I think it's likely that Parliament had more diverse accents in the 19th century when it was wildly posher than it did in the mid-twentieth century (and is now swinging back). It's a bit like how there are a number of, especially, Indian heritage MPs before the 30s when it's an imperial Parliament, and then all MPs are white until the 1980s which is Britain moving from empire to a nation and then the definition of who is within "the nation" evolving.

[HVC]

So you're saying the best part of English and England comes from the French? Next thing you're gonna tell poor josq is that the French introduced cars to England