Wordwatch: Place names

The great cities of northern England have been in the news a lot recently. It reminded me that the Russians have an endearing joke about English place names which illustrates how deep-seated Russian anglophilia is. “There’s a city in England”, the joke runs, “which is spelled Liverpool but pronounced Manchester.” We make similar jokes ourselves. The constitutional historian Romney Sedgwick used to observe, in his dry way, that there is an English town called Sawbridgworth which is pronounced Sapstead.

His own name, which itself comprises two place names, used not to be pronounced as spelt. “Romney” was always “Rumney” in the past, and to compound the complication, “Sedgwick” was pronounced “Sidjick”. The name of his great forebear, the geologist Adam Sedgwick, presumably ought to be pronounced that way. The world moves on. But we can be consoled by remembering that “Greenwich” is still usually pronounced “Grinnitch”, so it’s not an immutable rule that change will happen.

The variables can catch out even the most alert. The fishing village of Cley next the Sea in north Norfolk is always pronounced “Clay” by those who don’t know any better, while posh Norfolk people know that it should be “Cly”, to rhyme with “sky”. But if you talk to the Cley villagers themselves, you’ll find they say “Clay”.

There are many such traps among the place names of the English countryside. Next to Cley is the village of Wiveton, which I heard the other day pronounced “Wive-ton”.  I don’t think there is any doubt there: it has three syllables: “Wi-ve-ton”. And while we’re in Norfolk, how about “Hunstanton”, which used to be “Hunston”? And Stiffkey (of the famous mad vicar) correctly pronounced “Stookey”?

We’re probably familiar with a few of these tricky names. “Cirencester” is never, now, pronounced “Cissiter”, but it was, a hundred years ago. Several names incorporating the Roman “castrum” or camp, have acquired simplified pronunciations, like Gloucester and Worcester. These contractions often prove confusing to Americans, who prefer a phonetically literal pronunciation. We say “Darby”, they say “Derby” (to rhyme with “Kirby” which may also be written “Kirkby”) – going by the spelling on the page.

Many of the commonest confusions are to do with the coming of literacy in the 19th century, and literacy is the cause of many misunderstandings now. The way we pronounce “Romney” today is the result of our seeing it written. “Compton” likewise. There are plenty of survivals of the old way of pronouncing the sound of the vowel “o”: “love”, “above” and “dove” are obvious examples: they are words, perhaps, that are so much in common use that there hasn’t been an opportunity for new pronunciations to become established.

Another casualty of literacy is the letter “l”. In the past, words like “almighty” and “almost” were spoken with no audible “l” sound in them. The city of Bristol was “Bristo” – or “Bristow”, familiar now as a surname, where the “l” has mutated into something like a “w”. I find this one particularly interesting, because it seems to relate to the Polish consonant “ł”, which became familiar in Britain when the leader of Solidarity, Lech Wałęsa, was in the news in the 1980s, and the BBC went to great lengths to ensure its newsreaders got it right.

This local, Polish, variant of “l” is pronounced roughly like “w”, which seems an illogical mutation until we remember that many English speakers use “w” for “l” as a matter of course. Ask anyone you know a question, and they may begin to reply “Well…”. In a large proportion of cases that “Well…” will be pronounced with the concluding “l” sounded as a short “w”.  Try it.

If we natives have trouble with our own place names, it’s not surprising that people abroad are perplexed by them. How delightful of the Russians to have made an affectionate joke of it.