hardie (12/14/82)
For totally nonsensical pronunciation (or perhaps it's the spelling that's wrong) it is hard to beat the English. For example, there is the city of Leicester pronounced 'lester'. A few miles from my home town is a place called Rothwell which the locals pronounce in a way which mixes the sounds of the word 'roll' and vaguely rhymes with 'towel',no 'th' at all, (hard to get pronunciation across!). In the U.S. almost any place name that ends in '...ham' is pronounced such that the 'h' is sounded. However, in England the 'h' is rarely, if ever, pronounced. Instead it is pronounced as '..um' so that Birmingham is pronounced 'ber-ming-um' although I believe the locals pronounce it 'brum'! This pronunciation has even caused the BBC some problems because some place names are pronounced totally differently by the locals than by the rest of the country. There is one place (whose name I have forgotten ... sorry) which had a RAF base nearby and there was a news item about the RAF base, so the reporter pronounced the name of the town the way the RAF officers did, which was not the way locals pronounced it. There were lots of phone calls from the locals protesting the BBC's sloppy pronunciation of their town's name! (The BBC did not back down).
bcw (12/16/82)
From: Bruce C. Wright @ Duke University Re: Pronunciation of names in English It's not quite true that all place names in the US which end in -ham are pronounced with the 'h' - for example, Durham NC is pronounced by the locals as "Durram" or something similar - no 'h' at all. Don't even think I've heard anybody pronounce the 'h' at all... Of course, this may be because the place name is originally a place name from Olde England... Bruce C. Wright @ Duke University