Re: English is a crazy language

As a matter of interest, there's a village about ten km from me called
"Little Hautbois", pronounced locally /hobis/. Norfolk has a plethora of
elided spellings: Happisburgh /heizbr@/, Costessey /kosiy/, Wymondham
/wind@m/ and many others. It'd be interesting to see what's happened to
pronunciations of English place-names used as American ones. For instance,
do they have a 'Warwick' and if so is it pronounced the same as ours, i.e.,
/worik/? I have a feeling that US place names ending in -ham are pronounced
/h&m/ whereas ours are invariably -/@m/.
Mike (UK)
>
> The name of the oboe is also interesting.  It is Italian in origin,
> and came into English as usual by copying the spelling and applying
> an English pron /owbow/; the French version was "hautbois", which
> was at the time /o:bwe/, very like the Italian pron.  (English
> took up "hautboy" for a while but eventually abandoned the word.)
>
> --
> John Cowan <jcowan@...>     http://www.reutershealth.com
> I amar prestar aen, han mathon ne nen,    http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
> han mathon ne chae, a han noston ne 'wilith.  --Galadriel, _LOTR:FOTR_

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