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Pronunciation of ’Worcestershire’ | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages |  | |
| Malcolm Triglot Retired Moderator Senior Member Korea, South Joined 7103 days ago 500 posts - 515 votes  5 sounds Speaks: English*, Spanish, Korean Studies: Mandarin, Japanese, Latin | Message 9 of 15 23 July 2006 at 5:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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My family has always pronounced it as "woo-ster" or "woo-shter", and I have never heard anyone else pronounce it differently. My dad is British and my mom is Canadian.
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| Sir Nigel Senior Member United States Joined 6892 days ago 1126 posts - 1102 votes 2 sounds | Message 10 of 15 23 July 2006 at 6:05pm | IP Logged | ||
The Welsh names seem to be the words. I mean how can a word like Cywiwghglnw (fake example) exist? j/k Edited by Sir Nigel on 23 July 2006 at 6:05pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Saint Diglot Newbie South Africa Joined 6539 days ago 29 posts - 31 votes Speaks: English*, Afrikaans Studies: Norwegian | Message 11 of 15 23 July 2006 at 6:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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Give Featherstonehaugh a try. One way to pronounce it is Fanshaw!
Are you sure that's a fake Welsh name? Looks real enough to me! I believe Welsh spelling is more consistent than English, so I suppose there's that in their favour. Edited by Saint on 23 July 2006 at 6:26pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sinfonia Senior Member Wales Joined 6532 days ago 255 posts - 261 votes Speaks: English* | Message 12 of 15 23 July 2006 at 7:32pm | IP Logged | ||
Welsh is almost entirely 'phonetic' -- what you see is what you say (the only minor difficulty is guessing where the stress falls). English place names have much more diversity in rendition. The 'standard' pronunciation of Leicester (where I used to live) is identical to the male name 'Lester'. How would a foreigner manage nearby Loughborough? Worcester and Worcestershire are both said for the sauce. Many people, including me, pronounce the -shire on county names quite similar to 'sheer', but with a shorter and slightly more open vowel (like a long version of the vowel in 'hit'). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Captain Haddock Diglot Senior Member Japan kanjicabinet.tumblr. Joined 6556 days ago 2282 posts - 2814 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Ancient Greek | Message 13 of 15 23 July 2006 at 10:34pm | IP Logged | ||
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This is a pretty standard pattern for English place-names ending in -
cester. Any native English speaker should know how to say them. Worcestershire = "woostersher" Leicester = "lester" Gloucester = "gloster" Towcester = "toaster" (Forgive my poor phonetic spelling, this forum simply doesn't like IPA characters or anything else outside of ASCII.) -cester was an old Saxon word meaning "castle" (I think) that is just pronounced "ster" in names now. Also note that "shire" as a suffix is not pronounced like the stand-alone word (as Sinfonia points out). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| alcina Groupie United Kingdom Joined 6485 days ago 51 posts - 54 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, Italian | Message 14 of 15 26 July 2006 at 12:04pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've always called the sauce "Wuh:ster sauce", regardless of what's written on the label! Though if you read the label (as I did after looking at this thread) it is indeed labelled after the county and not the town and therefore *should* be called "Wuh:ster:sheer sauce". But no-one I know calls it that..we're clearly just lazy! This is not so much mispronounciation as we can't be bothered to read to the end of a long word and so we just say the first part and then conveniently forget what it's really called! Of course some difficult people call it "Lea and Perrin's" instead..who are the manufacturers!
Now if you really want to get Brits arguing with each other about pronounciation...ask a random selection how they pronounce "scone" :) Is it "skown" (as I pronounce it..and which is therefore obviously correct! ;)) or is it "skon"? Actually...just ask a random selection if it's "pronunciation" or "pronownciation"! We can't even agree amongst ourselves how a number of words are pronounced! One of the problems of having a newish language with several diverse antecedents I suppose! Also some British personal names take a bit of getting used to take: Beauchamp Cholmondeley Featherstonehaugh (not to be confused with Featherstone) : variations of these three particularly will come up in TV/films when they want to present an upper-crust Brit! They're pronounced respectively "Beechum" "Chumley" and "Fanshaw" (and the one in parenthesis is pronounced exactly as written!). But other than those I don't know why people think English spelling versus "pronownc"...sorry.."pronunciation" is at all odd! ;) P.S. Hey Sinfonia...how is "Luffbruh" these days? :) I used to live not far away myself! EDIT: oops..missed the mention of Featherstonehaugh in the posting above! Sorry! Alcina Edited by alcina on 26 July 2006 at 12:15pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sinfonia Senior Member Wales Joined 6532 days ago 255 posts - 261 votes Speaks: English* | Message 15 of 15 26 July 2006 at 3:10pm | IP Logged | ||
Drab, as ever :-/ 1 person has voted this message useful |
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