Throatwobbler Mangrove.
Just to confuse the issue, the surname of the aristocratic family Cecil used at one time to be pronounced “Sissill”.
Now, about “Mow-reece”…
Precisely. I in fact had an Uncle Cecil, who was always referred to as “Uncle Cece”, pronounced “sess”. In fact I only became aware of the “seesil” pronunciation via this thread. Yes, I’m British.
Well, no, it doesn’t imply any such thing: Nathaniel/Nathan/Nate, Katherine/Kat(i)e, Montgomery/Monty. Those vowel sounds change. It’s like saying acronyms must be pronounced with the original letter sounds of each constituent word. The nicknames are their own thing and are pronounced in a way that makes sense for their spelling. Plus who’s to say “Cece” isn’t pronounced “Cess”? That’s how I’d pronounce it in this case. (Though more often than not “Cece” is “see-see” to me, short for “Cecelia,” which I pronounce with an “eh” in the first syllable, but the nickname with an “ee” in the first syllable.)
Sea anemones are sessile
and put the vessel with the pestle
seeing Cecil by the sea shore.
Cecil sells sessile sea shells by the sea shore.
Should I cease and desist, before this thread descends into a cess pit?
Okay, at the risk of opening another can of worms, and/or exposing myself as an illiterate American: what vowel change do you perceive between Montgomery and Monty?
The pellet with the poison’s in the vessel with the pestle.
The chalice from the palace has the brew that is true.
same here. once again influenced by cecilia.
The first has a schwa, the second has what we’d call a “short o” sound, at least to me.
So /məntˈɡʌməɹi/ vs /ˈmɒnti/. And that’s straight from Wiktionary, so it looks like it’s not just me.
I watched the first few minutes of the video with Ed and I noticed that he pronounces aphids like “ah-phids” instead of “ay-phids”, so who knows if he’s pronouncing Cecil right.
Interesting. It would never have occurred to me to use a schwa for the first syllable of “Montgomery.” Trying to say it that way makes it sound weird to me.
That’s the standard way. Watch the Simpsons.
I would never use the way Simpsons characters talk as a standard for anything. 
Merriam-Webster lists it as the first pronunciation. Wiktionary doesn’t even give an alternate pronunciation. Now dictionary.com lists your pronunciation. It does look like the city in Alabama is pronounced your way. So perhaps it’s not that definitive one way or another which it is pronounced. But, to me, pronounced without a schwa sounds as weird as with a schwa does to you.
Now I’m unsure of how it’s pronounced on the Simpsons, but I hear it with a schwa in my head.
Oh, and here’s four audio samples spoken by Americans. They all sound like how I say it, though one may be a bit difficult to tell:
Well, it’s not the first time that the rest of the world fails to recognize my way of doing things as inherently correct, and it probably won’t be the last.
I’m sure it varies by dialect/region.
Almost certainly. And, to be a bit more serious, the funny thing about pronunciations is that you often hear what you expect to hear, and it can be difficult to perceive regional differences that are outside of your own dialect. For example, of those four audio samples, I hear three of them as having a “short o,” rather than a “schwa” sound, in the first syllable. Number three is the outlier for me.
To hopefully end the hijack and drag this back on topic, I pronounce Cecil as “See-sill,” but I’ve seen enough British movies and TV that the pronunciation “Sess-ill” is not unfamiliar.