The Bluestocking: Next stop, Christmas!

[ifIwerenotanandroid]

Join us as we open our slightly wonky advent calendar. 🌲

(copies available behind the bar £12.50 each, no refunds)

There is Draperstown in South Derry, which the villagers pronounce "Ballinascreen"

But that is an extreme localism 😉

An American sitting next to me on a plane asked me how to pronounce a few. The one he was surprised by was Cirencester.
Scotland has a few good ones too eg Hawick.
Wales otoh really is another language, I really need to do something about my ignorance on that front.

I used to live near Skelmanthorpe in Yorkshire, colloquially known as " Shat".

Our tree is up! Ds2 and his gf have helped me ice and decorate the Christmas cake (fetching and carrying, and the ds2 ate the leftover royal icing - he is such a hero), and then they all did the tree. I still need to make a tiffin cake, but that’s easy, and then it’s the final prep on Christmas Eve.

I’m watching The Snowman and starting to feel festive.

Pedantry Corner has a long and noble history, Errol😄

I offer Loughborough.

I was explaining to someone recently that the 'h' in Irish Gaelic spelling is not really a letter, it is used to indicate that the preceding consonant is softened, or even not pronounced at all, as in McGrath.
There used to be a dot placed over the consonant, but that was difficult for typing and printing, so they introduced a 'h' instead - which had been used in some old manuscripts, so it wasn't entirely new.

As I explained it, it sounded very complex and quirky - then I remembered that UK English uses doubled consonants to indicate how the preceding vowel is pronounced, e.g.
'travelled' as opposed to the US 'traveled', which we would instinctively pronounce as tra-veeled because the second 'l' tells us that the preceding 'e' is short.

Languages are wonderful, hours of entertainment in Pedantry Corner! And English is really fun because of all the historical layers and borrowings and so on.

The early days of my job included commercialising academic software - my English boss and I tried in vain to resist some of the Americanisation forced on us and therefore were inclined to pronounce ‘modeling’ to rhyme with ‘yodel’ rather than model for a while. A US colleague decided to do some global replacement which went awry when they somehow didn’t do the whole lot at once and there were many instances of ‘colour’ and ‘centre’ in variable names in the code.

It was mostly C++ in my undergrad days, and there's been a bit of python and Labview since. That probably doesn't narrow things down much for you.

No, it might genuinely be ‘outing’ to delve too far - my field is … was! .. very niche. I started in Fortran before C++ and managed to avoid Python, left that to the young folk.

I think there's a few of us on here in niche technical fields. It's my last day working before Christmas though so I'm very happy. I say "working", but I'm clearly not.

Am I too late to add Cholmondeley, pronounced Chumley, and Garboldisham, pronounced (iirc) Garblesham.

I posted on another thread ages ago that you can tell how posh someone is by how little the spelling of their name resembles the pronunciation. For example Saxe-Coburg-Gotha which is pronounced Windsor. 😃

🤣🤣
There is a village on the Essex coast.
St Osyth, always called Toosey.

I love these dialect pronunciations of place names.

When I stayed near Cirencester in the 90s for a few months, due to my job, the locals called it "Sinster"

There is also Ravenstonedale on the N Yorks/Cumbria border, pronounced Risendell.

There's Ahoghill in County Antrim, just outside Ballymena, which originally comes from the Irish Achadh Eochaille.

BBCNI newsreaders usually give it the full guttural on the 'gh', but anyone I know from the area always pronounces it 'Ackle'.

Did you mean Happisburgh rather than Hunstanton? I always pronounced the latter as it is spelled.

There were always a few die hard Huns'ton-ers, though most local inhabitants gave it three syllables.

I hope people are having a slightly better day. Horrid fog here with visibility at ca 100 yards and the lights on all day, the funeral happened, poor widow looking shattered but clearly surrounded by loving support. A couple of bills paid this afternoon, small town traffic insane, with people taking a creative and original approach to signage at junctions.

We would sometimes go there for a day out - visit the priory and a cream tea.

I've also heard Ahoghill pronounced locally as Ah-HOH-ill, without the 'gh' sound, which is close to the original two words, with the first syllable of the second word clearly sounded.

There's another Achadh Eochaille 'field of the yew trees' , in Co Down and it is a very close to the original 'Aghyoghill' in English, and there's another in Co. Cork which is anglicised as Ahiohill - which must be a nightmare to pronounce off the page!
Just imagine being a newsreader - 'And this just in from Co. Cork - a hoard of gold coins has been unearthed in the village of....[breaks out in sweat] 😄

edited to say - Sionnach, did you notice that Cullybackey gets a mention in the thread on changing accents/changing gender?
[another wee place not a million miles from Ahoghill, for the uninitiated]

I did spot Cullybackey!

There are a bunch of local variations in place names. Coalisland is one I always think of - often the first vowel gets completely dropped.

Or even translations, where I've known people who would always refer to Limavady as the Leap of the Dog 😉

I'd like to add Wrotham (Rootam), Meopham (Meppam) and Trottiscliffe (Trosley) to the place names. All Kentish. Not forgetting Ham and Sandwich, which are pronounced entirely as one would expect, but still make me smile since they're so close to each other.

And woe betide you if you pronounce Youghal (Tipperary) in the same way as Youghal (Cork).

Powerful and significant trees, yews.

Of course yew (a tree, or maybe the second person pronoun) is not to be confused with yow (a female sheep, which in some districts is pronounced yo, hip hop style).

There are so many Irish placenames with 'yew' in them that it obvious that the song 'I know I'll never find another yew' was not composed here.
I'll get my coat....😁

DH calls Hunstanton, Hunston.
And Happisburgh, Haysbruh.

Let us not forget Alresford (New and Old in Hampshire, and just plain Alresford in Essex): Arlesford.

And a real star, Herstmonceux in Sussex: Hurstmanzoo (how my aunt lolled when I got that one wrong).