Why are a few English surnames pronounced so differently than they are spelled? I’m thinking of names such as Churmondley (pronounced Chumley), Mainwaring (pronounced Mannering), and Featheringstonehaugh (pronounced Fanshaw). Stephen Fry mentioned these names in the afterword of a “Jeeves and Wooster” episode (he was commenting upon the pronunciation of P.J. Wodehouse’s name), but he never explained how or why their pronunciations had diverged from their spellings.
Were these names ever pronounced the way they were spelled? Or were they always pronounced the way they are now and the extra letters just thrown in later on a whim?
A WAG with no support: if you pronounce those names as they are spelled over and over agin rapidly, they start to sound like the current pronunciations. Seems to work. I don’t know if the British are known for being “fast-talkers”; there was a scene in an episode of “I Love Lucy” to that effect (that’s good enough for me!), but I don’t notice it in recent Britcoms, my only source for hearing British speakers.
Lots of possibilities. I’d guess that all the names were spelled the way they were pronounced at the time they were fixed in form (since that’s typical). As time went on, the pronunciations of longer names changed to make them easier to say.
The names may also have gotten their spelling through a folk etymology. Fir instance, “Churmondley” could have come from the French (something like Charminlé). Later the pronunciation changed.
Around here, I knew a Featherstonehaugh who did pronounce her name the same way it’s spelled (though not with the gutteral it obviously originally had).
“What we have here is failure to communicate.” – Strother Martin, anticipating the Internet.
FINUCANE=fi-NOO-kun
BEAUCHAMP=BEE-chum
An American in London had this conversation with a Bobby:
TOURIST: How do I get to Cholmondeley?
BOBBY: Cholmondeley? Never heart of it.
TOURIST: You know: C-h-o-l-m-o-n-d-e-l-e-y.
BOBBY: Ah yes. Chumley!
(A short conversation follows, ending with
BOBBY: I am planning a holidy to America, and I must be sure to see Niagara Falls.
TOURIST: Niagara Falls? Never heard of it.
BOBBY: You know: N-i-a-g-a-r-a F-a-l-l-s.
TOURIST: Ah, yes. Nuffles!
But what is a featherstonehaugh? My dictionary says ‘haugh’ is Scottish English for ‘a low-lying meadow in a river valley’. Is an FSH such a valley with light-weight stones?
I think they are elisions…old renderings of older words by a populace whose pronounciations/speech/accent etc. simply shortened them. Like Mousehole is “mowzal” and St. James is “Sinjin”…I don’t know this for a fact. One would need to know how they were pronounced by their “creators”. Also, very often words descended from other languages and in translation the pronounciation became confused. In “Ye Olde Shoppe”, “Ye” is pronounced “the” because " Y" looks like the Greek Theta (which is “T” in modern language). In old English, the symbol for theta was used for the “t” sound…hence, “Ye”. The third thing is that standardization of spelling is a fairly recent phenomenon. Shakespeare spelt his own name in varied fashion.
I discovered P. G. Wodehouse books as a young’un, and as a basic midwestern American kid, assumed the names were pronounced “normally”. One book was full of 'Cholmondley’s… pronounced Chall-MON’-do-lee, of course. And that’s how these names were voiced in my head for decades.
Until the saving power of audiobooks: “I say, Chumley! Let’s pop down to the pub, wot?”
Oh, and I was confused why a character would ask a separate question ("What?) at the end of so many sentences. The audiobook put that in perspective, too, as an quaint lilt.
So big thanks to Tony Britton and Jonathan Cecil, who read so many great Wodehouse books. And of course Fry and Laurie for being THE Jeeves and Wooster.
Wow, this must be close to a record for a zombie revival.
But I actually agree with our newcomer (welcome to SDMB, KSTV). Elision is a process of skipping over letters or syllables in words or names to make them easier to say. This happens without planning or regulation but becomes commonly accepted as they gain greater usage, and then become the standard. The long written version comes first, and then people get tired of trying to say all that, and it gets shortened over time.
Nitpick: “Sinjin” is the elided form of “St. John” not “St. James.”
Not quite. The Y is a substitute for the rune letter thorn, þ, which was not used in mainland Europe and so wasn’t in the typsetting fonts. The appearance has slowly changes to be open at the top so it resembled a y and that type was substituted. Thorn is still used in Icelandic.
