Re: OT: YAEPT: Sound changes in English place names (was Re: Another Glossotechnia playtesting report)

On 27/03/2008, Eric Christopherson <rakko@...> wrote:
>
>  Does anyone know the approximate sound changes, and the order they
>  went in, to get to the current pronunciation of <Featherstonehough>?
>  I can imagine some of them, but others are mysterious, e.g. where
>  the /S/ comes from. It even seems to have a metathesis, which I
>  assume is sporadic. Syncope alone does not seem enough to me. (Plus I
>  would think <hough> was /hVf/ or /hau/ or something, but not /hO/.)
You must bear in mind that these pronunciations we have today are by
and large the result of drastic simplifications by the peasantry etc.
who lived in those places in the past. Knowing that, there are two
important effects that follow:

1) Each name is altered based on differing phonetic/pronunciation
tendencies of different communities.
2) Each name is simplified without conscious thought as to historical accuracy.

Hence the corollaries, that it is more or less fruitless to attempt to
derive the order of changes as they happened to the names.
Featherstonehough > Fethstenaw > Feshnaw > Fenshaw is entirely
possible, though I just cooked it up myself.

As for "-hough", I think it is quite possible that it were pronounced
[-hOf] then subsequently dropped the [f], actually. Even if it were
pronounced [-hau], French provides an example of how that could've
been reduced to [-hO]. (:

[tSVmli] most probably dropped the first <l> since it came before an
[m]; it would likely have been vocalised and eventually elided. The
second would have had a stronger presence to endure the changes.

>  Anyway, are these sound changes considered 'regular' in the history
>  of English? Or at least regular within a certain domain (e.g. place
>  names)?
>
Yes, they are "regular" in place names. (Perhaps a better term would
be "ubiquitous", or "normal".) Check out [glOst3:], [wO4Ik], [dU4@m]
amongst others. And then there's also the Scottish city of [EdImb4@],
which is already one of the less egregious examples.

Eugene

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